Georg C. Lichtenberg Quotes

Is it not strange that mankind should so willingly battle for religion and so unwillingly live according to its precepts?

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

Truly, men make too little use of their lives; and so it is no wonder that the world should still be in such a poor way.

We judge nothing so hastily as character, and yet there is nothing over which we should be more cautious ... I have always found that the so-called bad people improve on closer acquaintance, while the good fall off.

There are two ways of extending life : firstly by moving the two points "born" and "died" farther away from one another ... The other method is to go more slowly and leave the two points wherever God wills they should be, and this method is for the philosophers.

A vacuum of ideas affects people differently than a vacuum of air, otherwise readers of books would be constantly collapsing.

As the few adepts in such things well know, universal morality is to be found in little everyday penny-events just as much as in great ones. There is so much goodness and ingenuity in a raindrop that an apothecary wouldn't let it go for less than half-a-crown ...

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.

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

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.

Virtue by premeditation isn't worth much.

The more experiences and experiments accumulate in the exploration of nature, the more precarious the theories become. But it is not always good to discard them immediately on this account. For every hypothesis which once was sound was useful for thinking of previous phenomena in the proper interrelations and for keeping them in context. We ought to set down contradictory experiences separately, until enough have accumulated to make building a new structure worthwhile.

If an angel were to tell us about his philosophy, I believe many of his statements might well sound like '2 x 2= 13'.

There were honest people long before there were Christians and there are, God be praised, still honest people where there are no Christians. It could therefore easily be possible that people are Christians because true Christianity corresponds to what they would have been even if Christianity did not exist.

A good metaphor is something even the police should keep an eye on.

To make astute people believe one is what one is not is, in most cases, harder than actually to become what one wishes to appear.

Before one blames, one should always find out whether one cannot excuse. To discover little faults has been always the particularity of such brains that are a little or not at all above the average. The superior ones keep quiet or say something against the whole and the great minds transform without blaming.

A man of spirit must not think of the word difficulty as so much as existing. Away with it!

The greatest events occur without intention playing any part in them; chance makes good mistakes and undoes the most carefully planned undertaking. The world's greatest events are not produced, they happen.

Imagine the world so greatly magnified that particles of light look like twenty-four-pound cannon balls.

I have remarked very clearly that I am often of one opinion when I am lying down and of another when I am standing up ...

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.

Great men too make mistakes, and many among them do it so often that one is almost tempted to call them little men.

Why does a suppurating lung give so little warning and a sore on the finger so much?

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.

He marvelled at the fact that the cats had two holes cut in their fur at precisely the spot where their eyes were.

Do we write books so that they shall merely be read? Don't we also write them for employment in the household? For one that is read from start to finish, thousands are leafed through, other thousands lie motionless, others are jammed against mouseholes, thrown at rats, others are stood on, sat on, drummed on, have gingerbread baked on them or are used to light pipes.

It not seldom happens that in the purposeless rovings and wanderings of the imagination we hunt down such game as can be put to use by our purposeful philosophy in its well-ordered household.

How happily some people would live if they troubled themselves as little about other people's business as about their own.

The journalists have constructed for themselves a little wooden chapel, which they also call the Temple of Fame, in which they put up and take down portraits all day long and make such a hammering you can't hear yourself speak.

I look upon book reviews as an infantile disease which new-born books are subject to.

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 too bad if you have to do everything upon reflection and can't do anything from early habit.

Do not take too artificial a view of mankind but judge them from a natural standpoint, deeming them neither over good nor over bad.

All mathematical laws which we find in Nature are always suspect to me, in spite of their beauty. They give me no pleasure. They are merely auxiliaries. At close range it is all not true.

Rational free spirits are the light brigade who go on ahead and reconnoiter the ground which the heavy brigade of the orthodox will eventually occupy.

Many intelligent people, when about to write ... , force on their minds a certain notion about style, just as they screw up their faces when they sit for their portraits.

One use of dreams is that, unprejudiced by our often forced and artificial reflections, they represent the impartial outcome of our entire being.

If there were only turnips and potatoes in the world, someone would complain that plants grow the wrong way.

We can see nothing whatever of the soul unless it is visible in the expression of the countenance; one might call the faces at a large assembly of people a history of the human soul written in a kind of Chinese ideograms.

How might letters be most efficiently copied so that the blind might read them with their fingers?

There are people who believe everything is sane and sensible that is done with a solemn face.

The most heated defenders of a science, who cannot endure the slightest sneer at it, are commonly those who have not made very much progress in it and are secretly aware of this defect.

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

I forget the greater part of what I read, but all the same it nourishes my mind.

Ambition and suspicion always go together.

Popular presentation today is all too often that which puts the mob in a position to talk about something without understanding it.

No people are more conceited than those who depict their own feelings, especially if they happen to have a little prose at their command for the occasion.

He was then in his fifty-fourth year, when even in the case of poets reason and passion begin to discuss a peace treaty and usually conclude it not very long afterwards.

I am always grieved when a man of real talent dies. The world needs such men more than Heaven does.

I ceased in the year 1764 to believe that one can convince one's opponents with arguments printed in books. It is not to do that, therefore, that I have taken up my pen, but merely so as to annoy them, and to bestow strength and courage on those on our own side, and to make it known to the others that they have not convinced us.

The motives that lead us to do anything might be arranged like the thirty-two winds and might be given names on the same pattern: for instance, "bread-bread-fame" or "fame-fame-bread.

The celebrated painter Gainsborough got as much pleasure from seeing violins as from hearing them.

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

Much can be inferred about a man from his mistress: in her one beholds his weaknesses and his dreams.

The human tendency to regard little things as important has produced very many great things.

What makes our poetry so contemptible nowadays is its paucity of ideas. If you want to be read, invent. Who the Devil wouldn't like to read something new?

Man is perhaps half mind and half matter in the same way as the polyp is half plant and half animal. The strangest creatures are always found on the border lines of species.

I made the journey to knowledge like dogs who go for walks with their masters, a hundred times forward and backward over the same territory; and when I arrived I was tired.

As nations improve, so do their gods.

Ask yourself always: how can this be done better?

Doubt everything at least once, even the sentence "Two times two is four."

Of all the inventions of man I doubt whether any was more easily accomplished than that of a Heaven.

It is with epigrams as with other inventions; the best ones annoy us because we didn't think of them ourselves.

To live when you do not want to is dreadful, but it would be even more terrible to be immortal when you did not want to be. As things are, however, the whole ghastly burden is suspended from me by a thread which I can cut in two with a penny-knife.

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.

Before we blame we should first see whether we cannot excuse.

The grave is still the best shelter against the storms of destiny.

Man is a masterpiece of creation, if only because no amount of determinism can prevent him from believing that he acts as a free being.

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.

If we make a couple of discoveries here and there we need not believe things will go on like this for ever. Just as we hit water when we dig in the earth, so we discover the incomprehensible sooner or later.

Do not judge God's world from your own. Trim your own hedge as you wish and plant your flowers in the patterns you can understand, but do not judge the garden of nature from your little window box.

Food probably has a very great influence on the condition of men. Wine exercises a more visible influence, food does it more slowly but perhaps just as surely. Who knows if a well-prepared soup was not responsible for the pneumatic pump or a poor one for a war?

To see every day how people get the name 'genius' just as the wood-lice in the cellar the name 'millipede'-not because they have that many feet, but because most people don't want to count to 14-this has had the result that I don't believe anyone any more without checking.

Nothing is more conducive to peace of mind than not having any opinion at all.

Everyone should study at least enough philosophy and belles-lettres to make his sexual experience more delectable.

As I take up my pen I feel myself so full, so equal to my subject, and see my book so clearly before me in embryo, I would almost like to try to say it all in a single word.

Cultivate that kind of knowledge which enables us to discover for ourselves in case of need that which others have to read or be told of.

An hour-glass is a reminder not only of time's quick flight, but also of the dust to which we must at last return

Body and soul: a horse harnessed beside an ox.

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

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

If another Messiah was born he could hardly do so much good as the printing-press.

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.

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 most dangerous untruths are truths slightly distorted.

Nowadays beautiful women are counted among the talents of their husbands.

First there is a time when we believe everything, then for a little while we believe with discrimination, then we believe nothing whatever, and then we believe everything again - and, moreover, give reasons why we believe.

How did mankind ever come by the idea of liberty? What a grand thought it was!

Courage, garrulousness and the mob are on our side. What more do we want?

Just as the performance of the vilest and most wicked deeds requires spirit and talent, so even the greatest demand a certain insensitivity which under other circumstances we would call stupidity.

Sickness is mankind's greatest defect.

Honor is infinitely more valuable than positions of honor.

Reading means borrowing.

Do not say hypothesis, and even less theory: say way of thinking.

A good part of the fame of most celebrated men is due to the shortsightedness of their admirers

A man always writes absolutely well whenever he writes in his own manner, but the wigmaker who tries to write like Gellert ... writes badly.

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

The natural scientists of the previous age knew less than we do and believed they were very close to the goal: we have taken very great steps in its direction and now discover we are still very far away from it. With the most rational philosophers an increase in their knowledge is always attended by an increased conviction of their ignorance.

People nowadays have such high hopes of America and the political conditions obtaining there that one might say the desires, at least the secret desires, of all enlightened Europeans are deflected to the west, like our magnetic needles.