Georg Christoph Lichtenberg

It is a sure evidence of a good book if it pleases us more and more as we grow older.

It not seldom happens that in the purposeless rovings and wanderings of the imagination we hunt down such game as can be put to use by our purposeful philosophy in its well-ordered household.

As nations improve, so do their gods.

Many a man who is willing to be shot for his belief in a miracle would have doubted, had he been present at the miracle itself.

Delicacy in woman is strength.

God creates the animals, man creates himself.

Too much is unwholesome.

Nothing makes one old so quickly as the ever-present thought that one is growing older.

To make a vow is a greater sin than to break one.

Just as there are polysyllabic words that say very little, so there are also monosyllabic words of infinite meaning.

Many are less fortunate than you' may not be a roof to live under, but it will serve to retire beneath in the event of a shower.

Every condition of the soul has its own sign and expression...So you will see how hard it is to seem original without being so.

The fly that doesn't want to be swatted is most secure when it lights on the fly-swatter.

Astronomy is perhaps the science whose discoveries owe least to chance, in which human understanding appears in its whole magnitude, and through which man can best learn how small he is.

Man is a masterpiece of creation . . .

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.

To see every day how people get the name 'genius' just as the wood-lice in the cellar the name 'millipede'-not because they have that many feet, but because most people don't want to count to 14-this has had the result that I don't believe anyone any more without checking.

The more experiences and experiments accumulate in the exploration of nature, the more precarious the theories become. But it is not always good to discard them immediately on this account. For every hypothesis which once was sound was useful for thinking of previous phenomena in the proper interrelations and for keeping them in context. We ought to set down contradictory experiences separately, until enough have accumulated to make building a new structure worthwhile.

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.

With most men, unbelief in one thing springs from blind belief in another.

It is almost impossible to carry the torch of truth through a crowd without singeing somebody's beard.

I forget the greater part of what I read, but all the same it nourishes my mind.

I am always grieved when a man of real talent dies. The world needs such men more than Heaven does.

It is with epigrams as with other inventions; the best ones annoy us because we didn't think of them ourselves.

I look upon book reviews as an infantile disease which new-born books are subject to.

One can live in this world on soothsaying but not on truth saying.

The drive to propagate our race has also propagated a lot of other things

The lower classes of men, though they do not think it worthwhile to record what they perceive, nevertheless perceive everything that is worth noting; the difference between them and a man of learning often consists in nothing more than the latter's facility for expression.

If it were true what in the end would be gained Nothing but another truth. Is this such a mighty advantage We have enough old truths still to digest, and even these we would be quite unable to endure if we did not sometimes flavor them with lies.

So-called professional mathematicians have, in their reliance on the relative incapacity of the rest of mankind, acquired for themselves a reputation for profundity very similar to the reputation for sanctity possessed by theologians.