Quotes By Georg C. Lichtenberg

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.

The sure conviction that we could if we wanted to is the reason so many good minds are idle.

Nothing can contribute more to peace of soul than the lack of any opinion whatever.

Everyone is a genius at least once a year. The real geniuses simply have their bright ideas closer together.

I believe that man is in the last resort so free a being that his right to be what he believes himself to be cannot be contested.

That man is the noblest creature may also be inferred from the fact that no other creature has yet contested this claim.

To be content with life or to live merrily, rather all that is required is that we bestow on all things only a fleeting, superficial glance; the more thoughtful we become the more earnest we grow.

With a pen in my hand I have successfully stormed bulwarks from which others armed with sword and excommunication have been repulsed.

Just as we outgrow a pair of trousers, we outgrow acquaintances, libraries, principles, etc., at times before they're worn out and times - and this is the worst of all - before we have new ones.

We say that someone occupies an official position, whereas it is the official position that occupies him.

We have no words for speaking of wisdom to the stupid. He who understands the wise is wise already.

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.

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.

Sickness is mankind's greatest defect.

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.