Quotes By Georg C. Lichtenberg
With a pen in my hand I have successfully stormed bulwarks from which others armed with sword and excommunication have been repulsed.
Georg C. Lichtenberg
One might call habit a moral friction: something that prevents the mind from gliding over things but connects it with them and makes it hard for it to free itself from them.
Georg C. Lichtenberg
We say that someone occupies an official position, whereas it is the official position that occupies him.
Georg C. Lichtenberg
Perhaps in time the so-called Dark Ages will be thought of as including our own.
Georg C. Lichtenberg
There exists a species of transcendental ventriloquism by means of which men can be made to believe that something said on earth comes from Heaven.
Georg C. Lichtenberg
The noble simplicity in the works of nature only too often originates in the noble shortsightedness of him who observes it.
Georg C. Lichtenberg
With prophecies the commentator is often a more important man than the prophet.
Georg C. Lichtenberg
Never undertake anything for which you wouldn't have the courage to ask the blessings of heaven.
Georg C. Lichtenberg
God created man in His own image, says the Bible; philosophers reverse the process: they create God in theirs.
Georg C. Lichtenberg
If people should ever start to do only what is necessary millions would die of hunger.
Georg C. Lichtenberg
Be wary of passing the judgment: obscure. To find something obscure poses no difficult, elephants and poodles find many things obscure.
Georg C. Lichtenberg
We cannot remember too often that when we observe nature, and especially the ordering of nature, it is always ourselves alone we are observing.
Georg C. Lichtenberg
The fly that doesn't want to be swatted is most secure when it lights on the fly-swatter.
Georg C. Lichtenberg
Delight at having understood a very abstract and obscure system leads most people to believe in the truth of what it demonstrates.
Georg C. Lichtenberg
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.
Georg C. Lichtenberg
I am convinced we do not only love ourselves in others but hate ourselves in others too.
Georg C. Lichtenberg
He who says he hates every kind of flattery, and says it in earnest, certainly does not yet know every kind of flattery.
Georg C. Lichtenberg
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.
Georg C. Lichtenberg
If all else fails, the character of a man can be recognized by nothing so surely as by a jest which he takes badly.
Georg C. Lichtenberg
To do the opposite of something is also a form of imitation, namely an imitation of its opposite.
Georg C. Lichtenberg
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.
Georg C. Lichtenberg
It is almost everywhere the case that soon after it is begotten the greater part of human wisdom is laid to rest in repositories.
Georg C. Lichtenberg
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.
Georg C. Lichtenberg