Quotes By Georg C. Lichtenberg

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

Sickness is mankind's greatest defect.

With prophecies the commentator is often a more important man than the prophet.

Never undertake anything for which you wouldn't have the courage to ask the blessings of heaven.

We accumulate our opinions at an age when our understanding is at its weakest.

God created man in His own image, says the Bible; philosophers reverse the process: they create God in theirs.

If people should ever start to do only what is necessary millions would die of hunger.

Erudition can produce foliage without bearing fruit.

Be wary of passing the judgment: obscure. To find something obscure poses no difficult, elephants and poodles find many things obscure.

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

Delight at having understood a very abstract and obscure system leads most people to believe in the truth of what it demonstrates.

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.

The fly that doesn't want to be swatted is most secure when it lights on the fly-swatter.

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

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.

I am convinced we do not only love ourselves in others but hate ourselves in others too.

If all else fails, the character of a man can be recognized by nothing so surely as by a jest which he takes badly.

Virtue by premeditation isn't worth much.

To do the opposite of something is also a form of imitation, namely an imitation of its opposite.

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.

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

Here take back the stuff that I am, nature, knead it back into the dough of being, make of me a bush, a cloud, whatever you will, even a man, only no longer make me me.

Man loves company - even if it is only that of a small burning candle.

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.

Man is to be found in reason, God in the passions.

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.

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.