Words matter. These are the best Georg C. Lichtenberg Quotes, and they’re great for sharing with your friends.
With prophecies the commentator is often a more important man than the prophet.
The American who first discovered Columbus made a bad discovery.
It is in the gift for employing all the vicissitudes of life to one’s own advantage and to that of one’s craft that a large part of genius consists.
The most perfect ape cannot draw an ape; only man can do that; but, likewise, only man regards the ability to do this as a sign of superiority.
Man is to be found in reason, God in the passions.
It is a question whether, when we break a murderer on the wheel, we do not fall into the error a child makes when it hits the chair it has bumped into.
What is called an acute knowledge of human nature is mostly nothing but the observer’s own weaknesses reflected back from others.
If people should ever start to do only what is necessary millions would die of hunger.
If the little bit you have is nothing special in itself, at least find a way of saying it that is a little bit special.
Virtue by premeditation isn’t worth much.
Even truth needs to be clad in new garments if it is to appeal to a new age.
Nothing is more conducive to peace of mind than not having any opinion at all.
Sickness is mankind’s greatest defect.
God created man in His own image, says the Bible; philosophers reverse the process: they create God in theirs.
A handful of soldiers is always better than a mouthful of arguments.
To grow wiser means to learn to know better and better the faults to which this instrument with which we feel and judge can be subject.
What is the good of drawing conclusions from experience? I don’t deny we sometimes draw the right conclusions, but don’t we just as often draw the wrong ones?
The most dangerous untruths are truths slightly distorted.
We accumulate our opinions at an age when our understanding is at its weakest.
Prejudices are so to speak the mechanical instincts of men: through their prejudices they do without any effort many things they would find too difficult to think through to the point of resolving to do them.
Nowadays three witty turns of phrase and a lie make a writer.
I am convinced we do not only love ourselves in others but hate ourselves in others too.
Delight at having understood a very abstract and obscure system leads most people to believe in the truth of what it demonstrates.
The Greeks possessed a knowledge of human nature we seem hardly able to attain to without passing through the strengthening hibernation of a new barbarism.
The sure conviction that we could if we wanted to is the reason so many good minds are idle.
Actual aristocracy cannot be abolished by any law: all the law can do is decree how it is to be imparted and who is to acquire it.
With a pen in my hand I have successfully stormed bulwarks from which others armed with sword and excommunication have been repulsed.
There is no greater impediment to progress in the sciences than the desire to see it take place too quickly.
Be wary of passing the judgment: obscure. To find something obscure poses no difficult, elephants and poodles find many things obscure.
Erudition can produce foliage without bearing fruit.
Nothing can contribute more to peace of soul than the lack of any opinion whatever.
If all else fails, the character of a man can be recognized by nothing so surely as by a jest which he takes badly.
To receive applause for works which do not demand all our powers hinders our advance towards a perfecting of our spirit. It usually means that thereafter we stand still.
There are very many people who read simply to prevent themselves from thinking.
Never undertake anything for which you wouldn’t have the courage to ask the blessings of heaven.
Man is a masterpiece of creation if for no other reason than that, all the weight of evidence for determinism notwithstanding, he believes he has free will.
To do the opposite of something is also a form of imitation, namely an imitation of its opposite.
He who is in love with himself has at least this advantage – he won’t encounter many rivals.
When an acquaintance goes by I often step back from my window, not so much to spare him the effort of acknowledging me as to spare myself the embarrassment of seeing that he has not done so.
Once we know our weaknesses they cease to do us any harm.
We say that someone occupies an official position, whereas it is the official position that occupies him.
With most people disbelief in a thing is founded on a blind belief in some other thing.
The pleasures of the imagination are as it were only drawings and models which are played with by poor people who cannot afford the real thing.
I cannot say whether things will get better if we change; what I can say is they must change if they are to get better.
A book is a mirror: if an ape looks into it an apostle is hardly likely to look out.
