Top 335 Quotes & Sayings by Georg C. Lichtenberg - Page 2

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.

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.

When an acquaintance goes by I often step back from my window, not so much to spare him the effort of acknowledging me as to spare myself the embarrassment of seeing that he has not done so.

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

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.

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

The Greeks possessed a knowledge of human nature we seem hardly able to attain to without passing through the strengthening hibernation of a new barbarism.

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

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

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.

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

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.

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.

If the little bit you have is nothing special in itself, at least find a way of saying it that is a little bit special.

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.

A schoolteacher or professor cannot educate individuals, he educates only species.

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.

The great rule: If the little bit you have is nothing special in itself, at least find a way of saying it that is a little bit special.

Delicacy in woman is strength.

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.

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

Some people feel with their heads and think with their hearts.

Love is blind, but marriage restores its sight.

The feeling of health can only be gained by sickness.

You believe I run after the strange because I do not know the beautiful; no, it is because you do not know the beautiful that I seek the strange.

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

Man…who lives in three places – in the past, in the present, and in the future – can be unhappy if one of these three is worthless. Religion has even added a fourth – eternity.

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

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

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

Marriage, in contrast to the flu, starts with a fever and ends with the chills.

The proof that man is the noblest of all creatures is that no other creature has ever denied it.

To read means to borrow; to create out of one s readings is paying off one's debts.

It is strange that only extraordinary men make the discoveries, which later appear so easy and simple.

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

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

It often takes more courage to change one's opinion than to stick to it.

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?

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.

What we have to discover for ourselves leaves behind in our mind a pathway that can be used on another occasion.

Everyone who has ever written will have discovered that writing always awakens something which, though it lay within us, we failed clearly to recognize before.

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

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

The greater part of human misery is caused by indolence.

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

It is we who are the measure of what is strange and miraculous: if we sought a universal measure the strange and miraculous would not occur and all things would be equal.

Be attentive, feel nothing in vain, measure and compare: this is the whole law of philosophy.

A donkey appears to me like a horse translated into Dutch.

Ask yourself always: how can this be done better?

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

Nothing puts a greater obstacle in the way of the progress of knowledge than thinking that one knows what one does not yet know.

The worst thing you can possibly do is worrying and thinking about what you could have done.

There are people who think that everything one does with a serious face is sensible.

He who understands the wise is wise already.

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

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

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.

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.

One has to do something new in order to see something new.

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