Georg Christoph Lichtenberg Quotes

When a book and a head collide and a hollow sound is heard, must it always have come from the book?

A book is a mirror: if an ape looks into it an apostle is hardly likely to look out.

I cannot say whether things will get better if we change; what I can say is that they must change if they are to get better.

That there are a hundred with wit for one with understanding is a true proposition with which many witless Dummkopf consoles himself.The Dummkopf should also reflect that there also a hundred possessing neither wit nor understanding for every man possessing wit .

You can make a good living from soothsaying but not from truthsaying

The thoughts written on the walls of madhouses by their inmates might be worth publicizing.

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

After all, is our idea of God anything more than personified incomprehensibility?

{Said in a letter to Voltaire}

When they have discovered truth in nature they fling it into a book, where it is even worse hands.

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.

In the weak, lack of strength to defend oneself passes over into complaining. This can be observed in children when they are mistreated by bigger children; but the best always stay obstinately and defiantly silent.

Everything that matters in life flows through tubes.

Is it not strange that men are so keen to fight for religion and so unkeen to live according to its precepts?

If we thought more for ourselves we would have very many more bad books and very many more good ones.

Prejudices are so to speak the mechanical instincts of men: through their prejudices they do without any effort many things they would find too difficult to think through to the point of resolving to do them.

To do just the opposite is also a form of imitation.

I am confident of my ability to demonstrate that one can sometimes believe in something and yet not believe in it. Nothing is less fathomable than the systems that motivate our actions.

Diogenes, filthily attired, paced across the splendid carpets in Plato's dwelling. Thus, said he, do I trample on the pride of Plato. Yes, Plato replied, but only with another kind of pride.

The highest level than can be reached by a mediocre but experienced mind is a talent for uncovering the weaknesses of those greater than itself.

The excuses we make to ourselves when we want to do something are excellent material for soliloquies, for they are rarely made except when we are alone, and are very often made aloud.

Nowadays three witty turns of phrase and a lie make a writer.

Where the frontier of science once was is now the centre.

First we have to believe, and then we believe.

There is something in our minds like sunshine and the weather, which is not under our control. When I write, the best things come to me from I know not where.

The most dangerous of all falsehoods is a slightly distorted truth.

If you are going to build something in the air it is always better to build castles than houses of cards.

It makes a great difference by what path we come to a knowledge of certain things. If we begin in our youth with metaphysics and religion we can easily proceed along a series of rational conclusions that will lead us to the immortality of the soul. Not every other path will lead to this, at least not quite so easily.

A person reveals his character by nothing so clearly as the joke he resents.

Nothing is more inimical to the progress of science than the belief that we know what we do not yet know.

To make a vow is a greater sin than to break one.

One of our forefathers must have read a forbidden book.

I forget most of what I read, just as I do most of what I have eaten, but I know that both contribute no less to the conservation of my mind and my body on that account.

One's first step in wisdom is to question everything - and one's last is to come to terms with everything.

It is almost impossible to carry the torch of truth through a crowd without singeing somebody's beard.

In his Comedy, Dante Alighieri names Virgil, with many tokens of respect, as his teacher, and yet as Herr Meinhard remarks, makes such ill use of him: clear proof that even in the days of Dante one praised the ancients without knowing why. This respect for poets one does not understand and yet wishes to equal is the source of the bad writing in our literature.

The man was such an intellectual he was of almost no use.

For the loss of those we have loved there is no alleviation but time and carefully and rationally chosen diversions such as will not cause our heart to reproach us.

It requires no especially great talent to write in such a way that another will be very hard put to it to understand what you have written

Many are less fortunate than you' may not be a roof to live under, but it will serve to retire beneath in the event of a shower.

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

There are very many people who read simply to prevent themselves from thinking.

Just as there are polysyllabic words that say very little, so there are also monosyllabic words of infinite meaning.

The fly that does not want to be swatted is safest if it sits on the fly-swat.

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

Nothing is more conductive to peace of mind than not having any opinions at all.

There are people who possess not so much genius as a certain talent for perceiving the desires of the century, or even of the decade, before it has done so itself.