Johann Kaspar Lavater Quotes

Injustice arises either from precipitation, or indolence, or from a mixture of both. - The rapid and slow are seldom just; the unjust wait either not at all, or wait too long.

Nothing is so pregnant as cruelty; so multifarious, so rapid, so ever teeming a mother is unknown to the animal kingdom; each of her experiments provokes another and refines upon the last; though always progressive, yet always remote from the end.

Who in the same given time can produce more than others has vigor; who can produce more and better, has talents; who can produce what none else can, has genius.

And still, laughter is akin to weeping.

He knows very little of mankind who expects, by any facts or reasoning, to convince a determined party man.

The manner of giving shows the character of the giver, more than the gift itself.

Joy and grief decide character. What exalts prosperity? what imbitters grief? what leaves us indifferent? what interests us? As the interest of man, so his God - as his God, so he.

Close thine ear against him that shall open his mouth secretly against another. If thou receivest not his words, they fly back and wound the reporter. If thou dost receive them, they fly forward and wound the receiver.

The worst of faces still is human.

The procrastinator is not only indolent and weak, but commonly, false, too; most of the weak are false.

The policy of adapting one's self to circumstances makes all ways smooth.

The more any one speaks of himself, the less he likes to hear another talked of.

Avoid connecting yourself with characters whose good and bad sides are unmixed and have not fermented together; they resemble vials of vinegar and oil; or palletts set with colors; they are either excellent at home and insufferable abroad, or intolerable within doors and excellent in public; they are unfit for friendship, merely because their stamina, their ingredients of character are too single, too much apart; let them be finely ground up with each other, and they are incomparable.

Man without religion is a diseased creature, who would persuade himself he is well and needs not a physician; but woman without religion is raging and monstrous.

It is one of my favorite thoughts that God manifests Himself to men in all the wise, good, humble, generous, great, and magnanimous men.

Be neither too early in the fashion, nor too long out of it; nor at any time in the extremes of it.

He scatters enjoyment who can enjoy much.

He also has energy who cannot be deprived of it.

The enemy of art is the enemy of nature; art is nothing but the highest sagacity and exertion of human nature; and what nature will he honour who honours not the human?

As the interest of man, so his God - as his God, so he.

He knows not how to speak who cannot be silent; still less how to act with vigour and decision. - Who hastens to the end is silent: loudness is impotence.

There are many kinds of smiles, each having a distinct character. Some announce goodness and sweetness, others betray sarcasm, bitterness and pride; some soften the countenance by their languishing tenderness, others brighten by their spiritual vivacity.

No communication or gift can exhaust genius or impoverish charity.

When you doubt between words, use the plainest, the commonest, the most idiomatic. Eschew fine words as you would rouge; love simple ones as you would the native roses on your cheek.

Neatness begets order; but from order to taste there is the same difference as from taste to genius, or from love to friendship.

Thinkers are as scarce as gold.

Loudness is impotence.

He who, in questions of right, virtue, or duty, sets himself above all ridicule, is truly great, and shall laugh in the end with truer mirth than ever he was laughed at.

The true friend of truth and good loves them under all forms, but he loves them most under the most simple form.

Not every one who has the gift of speech understands the value of silence.

You may depend upon it that he is a good man whose intimate friends are all good, and whose enemies are decidedly bad.

She neglects her heart who too closely studies her glass.

He who sedulously attends, pointedly asks, calmly speaks, coolly answers and ceases when he has no more to say is in possession of some of the best requisites of man

Action, looks, words, steps, form the alphabet by which you may spell character.

Desire is the uneasiness a man finds in himself upon the absence of anything whose present enjoyment carries the idea of delight with it.

Intuition is the clear conception of the whole at once.

He who has no taste for order, will be often wrong in his judgment, and seldom considerate or conscientious in his actions.

Stubbornness is the strength of the weak.

The prudent see only the difficulties, the bold only the advantages, of a great enterprise; the hero sees both; diminishes the former and makes the latter preponderate, and so conquers.

Defeat serves to enlighten us.

What is the elevation of the soul? A prompt, delicate, certain feeling for all that is beautiful, all that is grand; a quick resolution to do the greatest good by the smallest means; a great benevolence joined to a great strength and great humility.

Learn the value of a man's words and expressions, and you know him. Each man has a measure of his own for everything; this he offers you inadvertently in his words. He who has a superlative for everything wants a measure for the great or small.

Whatever obscurities may involve religious tenets, humility and love constitute the essence of true religion; the humble is formed to adore, the loving to associate with eternal love.

An entirely honest man, in the severe sense of the word, exists no more than an entirely dishonest knave: the best and the worst are only approximations of those qualities. Who are those that never contradict themselves? yet honesty never contradicts itself: Who are those that always contradict themselves? yet knavery is mere self-contradiction. Thus the knowledge of man determines not the things themselves, but their proportions, the quan∣tum of congruities and incongruities.

Many very intelligent agreeable persons have warts on the forehead, not brown, nor very large, between the eyebrows, which have nothing in them offensive or disgusting. - But a large brown wart on the upper lip, especially when it is bristly, will be found in no person who is not defective in something essential, or at least remarkable for some conspicuous failing.

The greatest of characters, no doubt, would be he, who, free of all trifling accidental helps, could see objects through one grand immutable medium, always at hand, and proof against illusion and time, reflecting every object in its true shape and colour through all the fluctuation of things.

To know yourself you have only to set down a true statement of those that ever loved or hated you.

I am prejudiced in favor of him who, without impudence, can ask boldly. He has faith in humanity, and faith in himself. No one who is not accustomed to giving grandly can ask nobly and with boldness.