Top 335 Quotes & Sayings by Georg C. Lichtenberg - Page 5

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.

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

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.

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.

With God thoughts are colors, with us they are pigments-even the most abstract one may be accompanied by physical pain.

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?

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

If countries were named after the words you first hear when you go there, England would have to be called Damn It.

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

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.

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."

A man has virtues enough if he deserves pardon for his faults on account of them.

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.

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

What concerns me alone I only think, what concerns my friends I tell them, what can be of interest to only a limited public I write, and what the world ought to know is printed.

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

Ideas too are a life and a world.

He swallowed a lot of wisdom, but all of it seems to have gone down the wrong way.

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

Reading means borrowing.

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

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.

What a blessing it would be if we could open and shut our ears...as easily as we open and shut our eyes.

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.

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

The most successful tempters and thus the most dangerous are the deluded deluders.

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

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.

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.

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.

Some people read only because they are too lazy to think.

In mathematical analysis we call x the undetermined part of line a: the rest we don't call y, as we do in common life, but a-x. Hence mathematical language has great advantages over the common language.

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.

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.

If it were true what in the end would be gained? Nothing but another truth. Is this such a mighty advantage? We have enough old truths still to digest, and even these we would be quite unable to endure if we did not sometimes flavor them with lies.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Some theories are good for nothing except to be argued about.

The writer who cannot sometimes throw away a thought about which another man would have written dissertations, without worry whether or not the reader will find it, will never become a great writer.

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.

The ordinary man is ruined by the flesh lusting against the spirit; the scholar by the spirit lusting too much against the flesh.

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.

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

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

People who have read a good deal rarely make great discoveries. I do not say this in excuse of laziness, but because invention presupposes an extensive independent contemplation of things.

One can live in this world on soothsaying but not on truth saying.

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

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.

Man is a masterpiece of creation . . .

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.

As soon as you know a man to be blind, you imagine that you can see it from his back.

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.

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

Good taste is either that which agrees with my taste or that which subjects itself to the rule of reason. From this we can see how useful it is to employ reason in seeking out the laws of taste.

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

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.

The construction of the universe is certainly very much easier to explain than is that of the plant.