Quotes By Georg C. Lichtenberg

Nowadays three witty turns of phrase and a lie make a writer.

There are very many people who read simply to prevent themselves from thinking.

Men still have to be governed by deception.

He who is in love with himself has at least this advantage - he won't encounter many rivals.

A handful of soldiers is always better than a mouthful of arguments.

Once we know our weaknesses they cease to do us any harm.

Perhaps in time the so-called Dark Ages will be thought of as including our own.

The noble simplicity in the works of nature only too often originates in the noble shortsightedness of him who observes it.

Many things about our bodies would not seem to us so filthy and obscene if we did not have the idea of nobility in our heads.

Every man has his moral backside which he refrains from showing unless he has to and keeps covered as long as possible with the trousers of decorum.

The American who first discovered Columbus made a bad discovery.

There is no greater impediment to progress in the sciences than the desire to see it take place too quickly.

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.

There are people who possess not so much genius as a certain talent for perceiving the desires of the century, or even of the decade, before it has done so itself.

If you are going to build something in the air it is always better to build castles than houses of cards.

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.

Doubt must be no more than vigilance, otherwise it can become dangerous.

We cannot remember too often that when we observe nature, and especially the ordering of nature, it is always ourselves alone we are observing.

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.

A person reveals his character by nothing so clearly as the joke he resents.

He who says he hates every kind of flattery, and says it in earnest, certainly does not yet know every kind of flattery.

Nothing makes one old so quickly as the ever-present thought that one is growing older.

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.

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.

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.

It is almost everywhere the case that soon after it is begotten the greater part of human wisdom is laid to rest in repositories.

With most people disbelief in a thing is founded on a blind belief in some other thing.

To err is human also in so far as animals seldom or never err, or at least only the cleverest of them do so.

We are obliged to regard many of our original minds as crazy at least until we have become as clever as they are.