Georg Christoph Lichtenberg

The American who first discovered Columbus made a bad discovery.

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.

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

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.

A good metaphor is something even the police should keep an eye on.

He who is in love with himself has at least this advantage - he won't encounter many rivals.

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

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.

What a blessing it would be if we could open and shut our ears...as easily as we open and shut our eyes.

There can hardly be a stranger commodity in the world than books. Printed by people who don't understand them; sold by people who don't understand them; bound, criticized and read by people who don't understand them; and now even written by people who don't understand them.

Why does a suppurating lung give so little warning and a sore on the finger so much?

Much reading has brought upon us a learned barbarism

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

The natural scientists of the previous age knew less than we do and believed they were very close to the goal: we have taken very great steps in its direction and now discover we are still very far away from it. With the most rational philosophers an increase in their knowledge is always attended by an increased conviction of their ignorance.

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

A sure sign of a good book is that you like it more the older you get.

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

All mathematical laws which we find in Nature are always suspect to me, in spite of their beauty. They give me no pleasure. They are merely auxiliaries. At close range it is all not true.

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

Many intelligent people, when about to write . . . , force on their minds a certain notion about style, just as they screw up their faces when they sit for their portraits.

The writer who cannot sometimes throw away a thought about which another man would have written dissertations, without worry whether or not the reader will find it, will never become a great writer.

The man was such an intellectual he was of almost no use.

Man who lives in three places Ђ' in the past, in the present, and in the future Ђ' can be unhappy if one of these three is worthless. Religion has even added a fourth Ђ' eternity.

The highest level than can be reached by a mediocre but experienced mind is a talent for uncovering the weaknesses of those greater than itself.

I am confident of my ability to demonstrate that one can sometimes believe in something and yet not believe in it. Nothing is less fathomable than the systems that motivate our actions.

To many people virtue consists chiefly in repenting faults, not in avoiding them.

Reading means borrowing.

To do just the opposite is also a form of imitation.

One of the greatest creations of the human mind is the art of reviewing books without having read them.

The highest point to which a weak but experienced mind can rise is detecting the weakness of better men.