Georg Christoph Lichtenberg

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

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

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

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

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.

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.

People who never have any time on their hands are those who do the least.

One of our forefathers must have read a forbidden book.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

The most perfect ape cannot draw an ape; only man can do that; but, likewise, only man regards the ability to do this as a sign of superiority.

Nowadays three witty turns of phrase and a lie make a writer.

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

Never undertake anything for which you wouldn't have the courage to ask the blessings of heaven.

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.

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.

Just as we outgrow a pair of trousers, we outgrow acquaintances, libraries, principles, etc., at times before they're worn out and times - and this is the worst of all - before we have new ones.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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.

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

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