Georg C. Lichtenberg

Man can acquire accomplishments or he can become an animal, whichever he wants. God makes the animals, man makes himself.

— Georg C. Lichtenberg

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

— Georg C. Lichtenberg

He who is in love with himself has at least this advantage -- he won't encounter many rivals.

— Georg C. Lichtenberg

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.

— Georg C. Lichtenberg

Affectation is a very good word when someone does not wish to confess to what he would none the less like to believe of himself.

— Georg C. Lichtenberg

One is rarely an impulsive innovator after the age of sixty, but one can still be a very fine orderly and inventive thinker. One rarely procreates children at that age, but one is all the more skilled at educating those who have already been procreated, and education is procreation of another kind.

— Georg C. Lichtenberg

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.

— Georg C. Lichtenberg

If an angel were ever to tell us anything of his philosophy I believe many propositions would sound like 2 times 2 equals 13.

— Georg C. Lichtenberg

If moderation is a fault, then indifference is a crime.

— Georg C. Lichtenberg

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.

— Georg C. Lichtenberg

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.

— Georg C. Lichtenberg

Astronomy is perhaps the science whose discoveries owe least to chance, in which human understanding appears in its whole magnitude, and through which man can best learn how small he is.

— Georg C. Lichtenberg

First we have to believe, and then we believe.

— Georg C. Lichtenberg

With most people disbelief in a thing is founded on a blind belief in some other thing.

— Georg C. Lichtenberg

With the majority of people unbelief in one thing is founded on the blind belief in another.

— Georg C. Lichtenberg

Many things about our bodies would not seem to us so filthy and obscene if we did not have the idea of nobility in our heads.

— Georg C. Lichtenberg

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

— Georg C. Lichtenberg

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.

— Georg C. Lichtenberg

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

— Georg C. Lichtenberg

A book is a mirror: If an ass peers into it, you can't expect an apostle to look out.

— Georg C. Lichtenberg

It is no great art to say something briefly when, like Tacitus, one has something to say; when one has nothing to say, however, and none the less writes a whole book and makes truth into a liar -- that I call an achievement.

— Georg C. Lichtenberg

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

— Georg C. Lichtenberg

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.

— Georg C. Lichtenberg

Man loves company, even if it is only that of a smoldering candle.

— Georg C. Lichtenberg

He who is enamored of himself will at least have the advantage of being inconvenienced by few rivals.

— Georg C. Lichtenberg

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.

— Georg C. Lichtenberg

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

— Georg C. Lichtenberg

Once the good man was dead, one wore his hat and another his sword as he had worn them, a third had himself barbered as he had, a fourth walked as he did, but the honest man that he was -- nobody any longer wanted to be that.

— Georg C. Lichtenberg

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.

— Georg C. Lichtenberg

If all mankind were suddenly to practice honesty, many thousands of people would be sure to starve.

— Georg C. Lichtenberg

What is the good of drawing conclusions from experience? I don't deny we sometimes draw the right conclusions, but don't we just as often draw the wrong ones?

— Georg C. Lichtenberg

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.

— Georg C. Lichtenberg

Once we know our weaknesses they cease to do us any harm.

— Georg C. Lichtenberg

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.

— Georg C. Lichtenberg

Even truth needs to be clad in new garments if it is to appeal to a new age.

— Georg C. Lichtenberg

He who says he hates every kind of flattery, and says it in earnest, certainly does not yet know every kind of flattery.

— Georg C. Lichtenberg

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

— Georg C. Lichtenberg

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?

— Georg C. Lichtenberg

A clever child brought up with a foolish one can itself become foolish. Man is so perfectible and corruptible he can become a fool through good sense.

— Georg C. Lichtenberg

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.

— Georg C. Lichtenberg

What most clearly characterizes true freedom and its true employment is its misemployment.

— Georg C. Lichtenberg

What I do not like about our definitions of genius is that there is in them nothing of the day of judgment, nothing of resounding through eternity and nothing of the footsteps of the Almighty.

— Georg C. Lichtenberg

Everyone is a genius at least once a year; a real genius has his original ideas closer together.

— Georg C. Lichtenberg

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.

— Georg C. Lichtenberg

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.

— Georg C. Lichtenberg

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

— Georg C. Lichtenberg

What is called an acute knowledge of human nature is mostly nothing but the observer's own weaknesses reflected back from others.

— Georg C. Lichtenberg

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

— Georg C. Lichtenberg

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

— Georg C. Lichtenberg

Ideas too are a life and a world.

— Georg C. Lichtenberg

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.

— Georg C. Lichtenberg

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

— Georg C. Lichtenberg

Man is always partial and is quite right to be. Even impartiality is partial.

— Georg C. Lichtenberg

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

— Georg C. Lichtenberg

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.

— Georg C. Lichtenberg

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

— Georg C. Lichtenberg

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.

— Georg C. Lichtenberg

Erudition can produce foliage without bearing fruit.

— Georg C. Lichtenberg

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

— Georg C. Lichtenberg

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

— Georg C. Lichtenberg

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

— Georg C. Lichtenberg

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

— Georg C. Lichtenberg

So-called professional mathematicians have, in their reliance on the relative incapacity of the rest of mankind, acquired for themselves a reputation for profundity very similar to the reputation for sanctity possessed by theologians.

— Georg C. Lichtenberg

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

— Georg C. Lichtenberg

To err is human also in so far as animals seldom or never err, or at least only the cleverest of them do so.

— Georg C. Lichtenberg

Every man has his moral backside which he refrains from showing unless he has to and keeps covered as long as possible with the trousers of decorum.

— Georg C. Lichtenberg

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.

— Georg C. Lichtenberg

We cannot remember too often that when we observe nature, and especially the ordering of nature, it is always ourselves alone we are observing.

— Georg C. Lichtenberg

If people should ever start to do only what is necessary millions would die of hunger.

— Georg C. Lichtenberg

The American who first discovered Columbus made a bad discovery.

— Georg C. Lichtenberg

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

— Georg C. Lichtenberg

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...

— Georg C. Lichtenberg

Man is a gregarious animal and much more so in his mind than in his body. A golden rule; judge men not by their opinions but by what their opinions have made of them.

— Georg C. Lichtenberg

We accumulate our opinions at an age when our understanding is at its weakest.

— Georg C. Lichtenberg

A handful of soldiers is always better than a mouthful of arguments.

— Georg C. Lichtenberg

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

— Georg C. Lichtenberg

Man is to be found in reason, God in the passions.

— Georg C. Lichtenberg

In each of us there is a little of all of us.

— Georg C. Lichtenberg

I am convinced we do not only love ourselves in others but hate ourselves in others too.

— Georg C. Lichtenberg

We often have need of a profound philosophy to restore to our feelings their original state of innocence, to find our way out of the rubble of things alien to us, to begin to feel for ourselves and to speak ourselves, and I might almost say to exist ourselves.

— Georg C. Lichtenberg

If this is philosophy it is at any rate a philosophy that is not in its right mind.

— Georg C. Lichtenberg

A man is never more serious than when he praise himself.

— Georg C. Lichtenberg

It is hardly to be believed how spiritual reflections when mixed with a little physics can hold people's attention and give them a livelier idea of God than do the often ill-applied examples of his wrath.

— Georg C. Lichtenberg

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.

— Georg C. Lichtenberg

The most dangerous untruths are truths slightly distorted.

— Georg C. Lichtenberg

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.

— Georg C. Lichtenberg

With prophecies the commentator is often a more important man than the prophet.

— Georg C. Lichtenberg

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

— Georg C. Lichtenberg

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

— Georg C. Lichtenberg

Reason now gazes above the realm of the dark but warm feelings as the Alpine peaks do above the clouds. They behold the sun more clearly and distinctly, but they are cold and unfruitful.

— Georg C. Lichtenberg

There is no more important rule of conduct in the world than this: attach yourself as much as you can to people who are abler than you and yet not so very different that you cannot understand them.

— Georg C. Lichtenberg

It is said that truth comes from the mouths of fools and children: I wish every good mind which feels an inclination for satire would reflect that the finest satirist always has something of both in him.

— Georg C. Lichtenberg

One cannot demand of a scholar that he show himself a scholar everywhere in society, but the whole tenor of his behavior must none the less betray the thinker, he must always be instructive, his way of judging a thing must even in the smallest matters be such that people can see what it will amount to when, quietly and self-collected, he puts this power to scholarly use.

— Georg C. Lichtenberg

People often become scholars for the same reason they become soldiers: simply because they are unfit for any other station. Their right hand has to earn them a livelihood; one might say they lie down like bears in winter and seek sustenance from their paws.

— Georg C. Lichtenberg

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.

— Georg C. Lichtenberg

There is no greater impediment to progress in the sciences than the desire to see it take place too quickly.

— Georg C. Lichtenberg

He was always smoothing and polishing himself, and in the end he became blunt before he was sharp.

— 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.

— Georg C. Lichtenberg

The noble simplicity in the works of nature only too often originates in the noble shortsightedness of him who observes it.

— Georg C. Lichtenberg

Cautiousness in judgment is nowadays to be recommended to each and every one: if we gained only one incontestable truth every ten years from each of our philosophical writers the harvest we reaped would be sufficient.

— Georg C. Lichtenberg