Georg Christoph Lichtenberg

To grow wiser means to learn to know better and better the faults to which this instrument with which we feel and judge can be subject.

Theologians always try to turn the Bible into a book without common sense.

The great rule: If the little bit you have is nothing special in itself, at least find a way of saying it that is a little bit special.

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.

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

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.

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

Just as the performance of the vilest and most wicked deeds requires spirit and talent, so even the greatest demand a certain insensitivity which under other circumstances we would call stupidity.

There is no more important rule of conduct in the world than this: attach yourself as much as you can to people who are abler than you and yet not so very different that you cannot understand them.

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

Rational free spirits are the light brigade who go on ahead and reconnoiter the ground which the heavy brigade of the orthodox will eventually occupy.

A schoolteacher or professor cannot educate individuals, he educates only species.

The human tendency to regard little things as important has produced very many great things.

The noble simplicity in the works of nature only too often originates in the noble shortsightedness of him who observes it.

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.

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.

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.

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

If this is philosophy it is at any rate a philosophy that is not in its right mind.

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.

I am convinced we do not only love ourselves in others but hate ourselves in others too.

Be wary of passing the judgment: obscure. To find something obscure poses no difficulty: elephants and poodles find many things obscure.

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

If people should ever start to do only what is necessary millions would die of hunger.

We are obliged to regard many of our original minds as crazy at least until we have become as clever as they are.

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.

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

We accumulate our opinions at an age when our understanding is at its weakest.

The most dangerous untruths are truths slightly distorted.

With prophecies the commentator is often a more important man than the prophet.