Top 335 Quotes & Sayings by Georg C. Lichtenberg - Page 6

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.

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

He marvelled at the fact that the cats had two holes cut in their fur at precisely the spot where their eyes were.

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

What you have been obliged to discover by yourself leaves a path in your mind which you can use again when the need arises.

I have never yet met anyone who did not think it was an agreeable sensation to cut tinfoil with scissors.

One of our forefathers must have read a forbidden book.

The wisdom of providence is as much revealed in the rarity of genius, as in the circumstance that not everyone is deaf or blind.

Imagine the world so greatly magnified that particles of light look like twenty-four-pound cannon balls.

Perseverance can lend the appearance of dignity and grandeur to many actions, just as silence in company affords wisdom and apparent intelligence to a stupid person.

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 "second sight" possessed by the Highlanders in Scotland is actually a foreknowledge of future events. I believe they possess this gift because they don't wear trousers.

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

Most subjects at universities are taught for no other purpose than that they may be re-taught when the students become teachers.

The drive to propagate our race has also propagated a lot of other things

Nothing reveals a man's character better than the kind of joke at which he takes offense.

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.

First there is a time when we believe everything, then for a little while we believe with discrimination, then we believe nothing whatever, and then we believe everything again - and, moreover, give reasons why we believe.

Some people come by the name of genius in the same way that certain insects come by the name of centipede -- not because they have a hundred feet, but because most people can't count above 14.

Pain warns us not to exert our limbs to the point of breaking them. How much knowledge would we not need to recognize this by the exercise of mere reason.

With most men, unbelief in one thing springs from blind belief in another.

It is a great shame; most of our words are misused tools / which often still smell of the mud in which previous owners / desecrated them.

I would give something to know for whose sake precisely those deeds were really done which report says were done for the fatherland.

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.

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.

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

One should never trust a person who, while assuring you of something, puts his hands on his heart.

A writer who wishes to be read by posterity must not be averse to putting hints which might give rise to whole books, or ideas for learned discussions, in some corner of a chapter so that one should think he can afford to throw them away by the thousand.

An hour-glass is a reminder not only of time's quick flight, but also of the dust to which we must at last return

As the few adepts in such things well know, universal morality is to be found in little everyday penny-events just as much as in great ones. There is so much goodness and ingenuity in a raindrop that an apothecary wouldn't let it go for less than half-a-crown.

Perhaps pure reason without heart would never have thought of God.

Honest unaffected distrust of human abilities under all circumstances is the surest sign of strength of mind.

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.

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

Libraries can in general be too narrow or too wide for the soul.