Johann Kaspar Lavater Quotes

Close thine ear against him that shall open his mouth secretly against another. If thou receivest not his words, they fly back and wound the reporter. If thou dost receive them, they fly forward and wound the receiver.

He who is passionate and hasty is generally honest. It is your cool, dissembling hypocrite of whom you should beware.

Conscience is wiser than science.

Defeat serves to enlighten us.

Modesty is silent when it would be improper to speak; the humble, without being called upon, never recollects to say anything of himself.

The smiles that encourage severity of judgment hide malice and insincerity.

Who forces himself on others is to himself a load. Impetuous curiosity is empty and inconstant. Prying intrusion may be suspected of whatever is little.

He, who boldly interposes between a merciless censor and his prey, is a man of vigor: and he who, mildly wise, without wounding, convinces him of his error, commands our veneration.

Avoid connecting yourself with characters whose good and bad sides are unmixed and have not fermented together; they resemble vials of vinegar and oil; or palletts set with colors; they are either excellent at home and insufferable abroad, or intolerable within doors and excellent in public; they are unfit for friendship, merely because their stamina, their ingredients of character are too single, too much apart; let them be finely ground up with each other, and they are incomparable.

The creditor whose appearance gladdens the heart of a debtor may hold his head in sunbeams and his foot on storms.

The horse-laugh indicates brutality of character.

Who gives a trifle meanly is meaner than the trifle.

Who is fatal to others is so to himself.

Him, who incessantly laughs in the street, you may commonly hear grumbling in his closet.

He who comes from the kitchen, smells of its smoke; and he who adheres to a sect, has something of its cant; the college air pursues the student; and dry inhumanity him who herds with literary pedants.

The great rule of moral conduct is next to God, respect time.

The proportion of genius to the vulgar is like one to a million.

Nothing is so pregnant as cruelty; so multifarious, so rapid, so ever teeming a mother is unknown to the animal kingdom; each of her experiments provokes another and refines upon the last; though always progressive, yet always remote from the end.

Stubbornness is the strength of the weak.

Too much gravity argues a shallow mind.

The more unharmonious and inconsistent your objects of desire, the more inconsequent, inconstant, unquiet, the more ignoble, idiotical, and criminal yourself.

I am prejudiced in favor of him who, without impudence, can ask boldly. He has faith in humanity, and faith in himself. No one who is not accustomed to giving grandly can ask nobly and with boldness.

Thinkers are scarce as gold; but he whose thoughts embrace all his subject, and who pursues it uninterruptedly and fearless of consequences, is a diamond of enormous size.

Superstition always inspires littleness, religion grandeur of mind; the superstitious raises beings inferior to himself to deities.

Have you ever seen a pedant with a warm heart?

Borrowed wit is the poorest wit.

It is one of my favorite thoughts that God manifests Himself to men in all the wise, good, humble, generous, great, and magnanimous men.

Say not you know another entirely till you have divided an inheritance with him.

Who despises all that is despicable is made to be impressed with all that is grand.

Whatever obscurities may involve religious tenets, humility and love constitute the essence of true religion; the humble is formed to adore, the loving to associate with eternal love.

Who affects useless singularities has surely a little mind.

He surely is most in need of another's patience, who has none of his own.

It is a poor wit who lives by borrowing the words, decisions, mien, inventions and actions of others.

Who begins with severity, in judging of another, ends commonly with falsehood.

He who always seeks more light the more he finds, and finds more the more he seeks, is one of the few happy mortals who take and give in every point of time. The tide and ebb of giving and receiving is the sum of human happiness, which he alone enjoys who always wishes to acquire new knowledge, and always finds it.

Calmness of will is a sign of grandeur.

The public seldom forgive twice.

As a man's salutations, so is the total of his character; in nothing do we lay ourselves so open as in our manner of meeting and salutation.

May God preserve those he loves from profitless reading.

The true friend of truth and good loves them under all forms, but he loves them most under the most simple form.

Indiscretion, rashness, falsehood, levity, and malice, produce each other.

Malice is poisoned by her own venom.

Faces are as legible as books, only with these circumstances to recommend them to our perusal, that they are read in much less time, and are much less likely to deceive us.

Injustice arises either from precipitation, or indolence, or from a mixture of both. - The rapid and slow are seldom just; the unjust wait either not at all, or wait too long.

Decided ends are sure signs of a decided character.

Neither refinement nor delicacy is indispensable to produce elegance.

Receive no satisfaction for premeditated impertinence; forget it, forgive it, but keep him inexorably at a distance who offered it.

His calumny is not only the greatest benefit a rogue can confer on us, but the only service he will perform for nothing.

He who prorogues the honesty of today till to-morrow will probably prorogue his to-morrows to eternity.

There are three classes of men; the retrograde, the stationary and the progressive.

To realize that you were mistaken, is just the acknowledgement , that you are wiser today than you were yesterday.

Take here the grand secret; if not of pleasing all, yet of displeasing none, and court mediocrity, avoid originality, and sacrifice to fashion.

She whom smiles and tears make equally lovely may command all hearts.

The acquisition of will, for one thing exclusively, presupposes entire acquaintance with many others.

Women are proverbially credulous.

Weaknesses, so called, are nothing more nor less than vice in disguise!

The prudent see only the difficulties, the bold only the advantages, of a great enterprise; the hero sees both; diminishes the former and makes the latter preponderate, and so conquers.

You may tell a man thou art a fiend, but not your nose wants blowing; to him alone who can bear a thing of that kind, you may tell all.

Who knows whence he comes, where he is, and whither he tends, he, and he alone, is wise.

Before thou callest a man hero or genius, investigate whether his exertion has features of indelibility; for all that is celestial, all genius, is the offspring of immortality.

He who seeks to imbitter innocent pleasure has a cancer in his heart.

The enemy of art is the enemy of nature; art is nothing but the highest sagacity and exertions of human nature; and what nature will he honor who honors not the human?

God protects those he loves from worthless reading.

He who purposely cheats his friend would cheat his God.

Conscience is the sentinel of virtue.

Those who speak always and those who never speak are equally unfit for friendship. A food proportion of the talent of listening and speaking is the base of social virtues.

What knowledge is there of which man is capable that is not founded on the exterior,
the relation that exists between visible and invisible, the perceptible and the imperceptible?

He also has energy who cannot be deprived of it.

Beware of biting jests; the more truth they carry with them, the greater wounds they give, the greater smarts they cause, and the greater scars they leave behind them.

Happy the heart to whom God has given enough strength and courage to suffer for Him, to find happiness in simplicity and the happiness of others.

True love, like the eye, can bear no flaw.

The craftiest trickery are too short and ragged a cloak to cover a bad heart.

A gift
its kind, its value and appearance; the silence or the pomp that attends it; the style in which it reaches you
may decide the dignity or vulgarity of the giver.

The freer you feel yourself in the presence of another, the more free is he.

He who always prefaces his tale with laughter, is poised between impertinence and folly.

Dread more the blunderer's friendship than the calumniator's enmity.

No communication or gift can exhaust genius or impoverish charity.

Be neither too early in the fashion, nor too long out of it; nor at any time in the extremes of it.

He who can at all times sacrifice pleasure to duty approaches sublimity.

A sneer is often the sign of heartless malignity.

Avoid the eye that discovers with rapidity the bad, and is slow to see the good.

Every man has his devilish minutes.

The humblest star twinkles most in the darkest night.

Trust him not with your secrets, who, when left alone in your room, turns over your papers.

Man is forever the same; the same under every form, in all situations and relations that admit of free and unrestrained exertion. The same regard which you have for yourself, you have for others, for nature, for the invisible ... which you call God.

He has oratory who ravishes his hearers while he forgets himself.

Who has witnessed one free and unconstrained act of yours, has witnessed all.

Truth, wisdom, love, seek reasons; malice only seeks causes.

The ambitious sacrifices all to what he terms honor, as the miser all to money.

Fools learn nothing from wise men, but wise men learn much from fools.

He who seldom speaks, and with one calm well-timed word can strike dumb the loquacious, is a genius or a hero.

Who makes quick use of the moment is a genius of prudence.

Strange that cowards cannot see that their greatest safety lies in dauntless courage.

Mistrust the person who finds everything good, and the person who finds everything evil, and mistrust even more the person who is indifferent to everything.

Man without religion is a diseased creature, who would persuade himself he is well and needs not a physician; but woman without religion is raging and monstrous.

He, who cannot forgive a trespass of malice to his enemy, has never yet tasted the most sublime enjoyment of love.

Who cuts is easily wounded. The readier you are to offend the sooner you are offended.

Loudness is impotence.

True worth is as inevitably discovered by the facial expression, as its opposite is sure to be clearly represented there. The human face is nature's tablet, the truth is certainly written thereon.

Airs of importance are the credentials of impotence.