Georg Christoph Lichtenberg

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

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

We have no words for speaking of wisdom to the stupid. He who understands the wise is wise already.

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.

Actual aristocracy cannot be abolished by any law: all the law can do is decree how it is to be imparted and who is to acquire it.

Astronomy is perhaps the science whose discoveries owe least to chance, in which human understanding appears in its whole magnitude, and through which man can best learn how small he is.

Man can acquire accomplishments or he can become an animal, whichever he wants. God makes the animals, man makes himself.

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

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

If moderation is a fault, then indifference is a crime.

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 an angel were ever to tell us anything of his philosophy I believe many propositions would sound like 2 times 2 equals 13.

With the majority of people unbelief in one thing is founded on the blind belief in another.

With most people disbelief in a thing is founded on a blind belief in some other thing.

First we have to believe, and then we believe.

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.

To be content with life -- or to live merrily, rather --all that is required is that we bestow on all things only a fleeting, superficial glance; the more thoughtful we become the more earnest we grow.

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.

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.

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.

Affectation is a very good word when someone does not wish to confess to what he would none the less like to believe of himself.

There is no greater impediment to progress in the sciences than the desire to see it take place too quickly.

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

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

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.

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

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

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

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