Georg Christoph Lichtenberg

We have to believe that everything has a cause, as the spider spins its web in order to catch flies. But it does this before it knows there are such things as flies.

They do not think, therefore they are not.

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

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

As I take up my pen I feel myself so full, so equal to my subject, and see my book so clearly before me in embryo, I would almost like to try to say it all in a single word.

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

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

Delight at having understood a very abstract and obscure system leads most people to believe in the truth of what it demonstrates.

In every man there is something of all men.

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

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

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

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

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

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.

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

Nowadays beautiful women are counted among the talents of their husbands.

Probably no invention came more easily to man than heaven.

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

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

Everyone is perfectly willing to learn from unpleasant experience - if only the damage of the first lesson could be repaired.

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

God, who winds up our sundials ...