Quotes By Georg C. Lichtenberg

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.

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.

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

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

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.

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.

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.