Georg Christoph Lichtenberg

He who says he hates every kind of flattery, and says it in earnest, certainly does not yet know every kind of flattery.

Food probably has a very great influence on the condition of men. Wine exercises a more visible influence, food does it more slowly but perhaps just as surely. Who knows if a well-prepared soup was not responsible for the pneumatic pump or a poor one for a war?

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

A clever child brought up with a foolish one can itself become foolish. Man is so perfectible and corruptible he can become a fool through good sense.

Everyone is a genius at least once a year; a real genius has his original ideas closer together.

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.

Even truth needs to be clad in new garments if it is to appeal to a new age.

Once we know our weaknesses they cease to do us any harm.

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.

A vacuum of ideas affects people differently than a vacuum of air, otherwise readers of books would be constantly collapsing.

Once the good man was dead, one wore his hat and another his sword as he had worn them, a third had himself barbered as he had, a fourth walked as he did, but the honest man that he was -- nobody any longer wanted to be that.

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

If all else fails, the character of a man can be recognized by nothing so surely as by a jest which he takes badly.

A person reveals his character by nothing so clearly as the joke he resents.

If all mankind were suddenly to practice honesty, many thousands of people would be sure to starve.

The fly that does not want to be swatted is safest if it sits on the fly-swat.

There are people who possess not so much genius as a certain talent for perceiving the desires of the century, or even of the decade, before it has done so itself.

What most clearly characterizes true freedom and its true employment is its misemployment.

Man loves company, even if it is only that of a smoldering candle.

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

It is no great art to say something briefly when, like Tacitus, one has something to say; when one has nothing to say, however, and none the less writes a whole book and makes truth into a liar -- that I call an achievement.