Georg Christoph Lichtenberg

You believe I run after the strange because I do not know the beautiful; no, it is because you do not know the beautiful that I seek the strange.

A man of spirit must not think of the word difficulty as so much as existing. Away with it!

The most entertaining surface on earth is the human face.

How did mankind ever come by the idea of liberty? What a grand thought it was!

The fruits of philosophy are the important thing, not the philosophy itself. When we ask the time, we don't want to know how watches are made.

Erudition can produce foliage without bearing fruit.

I am grateful that I am not as judgmental as all those censorious, self-righteous people around me. In each of us there is a little of all of us.

What you have been obliged to discover by yourself leaves a path in your mind which you can use again when the need arises.

Imagine the world so greatly magnified that particles of light look like twenty-four-pound cannon balls.

What we have to discover for ourselves leaves behind in our mind a pathway that can be used on another occasion.

There exists a species of transcendental ventriloquism by means of which men can be made to believe that something said on earth comes from Heaven.

Doubt everything at least once, even the sentence \'Two times two is four.\'

Pain warns us not to exert our limbs to the point of breaking them. How much knowledge would we not need to recognize this by the exercise of mere reason.

People who have read a good deal rarely make great discoveries. I do not say this in excuse of laziness, but because invention presupposes an extensive independent contemplation of things.

With God thoughts are colors, with us they are pigments-even the most abstract one may be accompanied by physical pain.

The feeling of health can only be gained by sickness.

Never undertake anything unless you have the heart to ask Heaven's blessing on your undertaking.

If nature be regarded as the teacher and we poor human beings as her pupils, the human race presents a very curious picture. We all sit together at a lecture and possess the necessary principles for understanding it, yet we always pay more attention to the chatter of our fellow students than to the lecturer's discourse. Or, if our neighbor copies something down, we sneak it from him, stealing what he himself may have heard imperfectly, and add it to our own errors of spelling and opinion.

I made the journey to knowledge like dogs who go for walks with their masters, a hundred times forward and backward over the same territory; and when I arrived I was tired.

Brevity: To say at once whatever is to be said.

There is a great difference between believing in something and believing in it again.

Some people feel with their heads and think with their hearts.

The great trick of regarding small departures from the truth as the truth itself - on which is founded the entire integral calculus - is also the basis of our witty speculations, where the whole thing would often collapse if we considered the departures with philosophical rigour.

The book which most deserved to be banned would be a catalog of banned books.

I would give something to know for whose sake precisely those deeds were really done which report says were done for the fatherland.

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

The greater part of human misery is caused by indolence.

Nothing puts a greater obstacle in the way of the progress of knowledge than thinking that one knows what one does not yet know.

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

Whenever he composes a critical review, I have been told, he gets an enormous erection.