Georg Christoph Lichtenberg

Before we blame we should first see whether we cannot excuse.

It is a great shame; most of our words are misused tools / which often still smell of the mud in which previous owners / desecrated them.

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.

I have often noticed that when people come to understand a mathematical proposition in some other way than that of the ordinary demonstration, they promptly say, \'Oh, I see. That's how it must be.\' This is a sign that they explain it to themselves from within their own system.

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.

A good part of the fame of most celebrated men is due to the shortsightedness of their admirers

There is something in our minds like sunshine and the weather, which is not under our control. When I write, the best things come to me from I know not where.

Bad writers are those who try to express their own feeble ideas in the language of good ones.

Most men of education are more superstitious than they admit - nay, than they think.

Barbaric accuracy - whimpering humility.

One's first step in wisdom is to question everything - and one's last is to come to terms with everything.

Some people come by the name of genius in the same way that certain insects come by the name of centipede -- not because they have a hundred feet, but because most people can't count above 14.

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

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.

To err is human also in so far as animals seldom or never err, or at least only the cleverest of them do so.

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

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

Man is to be found in reason, God in the passions.

The thoughts written on the walls of madhouses by their inmates might be worth publicizing.

Do not judge God's world from your own. Trim your own hedge as you wish and plant your flowers in the patterns you can understand, but do not judge the garden of nature from your little window box.

Be attentive, feel nothing in vain, measure and compare: this is the whole law of philosophy.

Those who have racked their brains to discover new proofs have perhaps been induced to do so by a compulsion they could not quite explain to themselves. Instead of giving us their new proofs they should have explained to us the motivation that constrained them to search for them.

People nowadays have such high hopes of America and the political conditions obtaining there that one might say the desires, at least the secret desires, of all enlightened Europeans are deflected to the west, like our magnetic needles.

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

Before one blames, one should always find out whether one cannot excuse. To discover little faults has been always the particularity of such brains that are a little or not at all above the average. The superior ones keep quiet or say something against the whole and the great minds transform without blaming.

It is certainly not a matter of indifference whether I learn something without effort or finally arrive at it myself through my system of thought. In the latter case everything has roots, in the former it is merely superficial.

If countries were named after the words you first hear when you go there, England would have to be called Damn It.

Cultivate that kind of knowledge which enables us to discover for ourselves in case of need that which others have to read or be told of.

Popular presentation today is all too often that which puts the mob in a position to talk about something without understanding it.

What makes our poetry so contemptible nowadays is its paucity of ideas. If you want to be read, invent. Who the Devil wouldn't like to read something new?