Georg Christoph Lichtenberg

The most successful tempters and thus the most dangerous are the deluded deluders.

The greatest events occur without intention playing any part in them; chance makes good mistakes and undoes the most carefully planned undertaking. The world's greatest events are not produced, they happen.

Some theories are good for nothing except to be argued about.

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

It is too bad if you have to do everything upon reflection and can't do anything from early habit.

Ideas too are a life and a world.

What is the good of drawing conclusions from experience? I don't deny we sometimes draw the right conclusions, but don't we just as often draw the wrong ones?

The construction of the universe is certainly very much easier to explain than is that of the plant.

Love is blind, but marriage restores its sight.

If we make a couple of discoveries here and there we need not believe things will go on like this for ever. Just as we hit water when we dig in the earth, so we discover the incomprehensible sooner or later.

A man has virtues enough if he deserves pardon for his faults on account of them.

If an angel were to tell us about his philosophy, I believe many of his statements might well sound like '2 x 2= 13'.

Non cogitant, ergo non sunt.

We can see nothing whatever of the soul unless it is visible in the expression of the countenance; one might call the faces at a large assembly of people a history of the human soul written in a kind of Chinese ideograms.

Good taste is either that which agrees with my taste or that which subjects itself to the rule of reason. From this we can see how useful it is to employ reason in seeking out the laws of taste.

I ceased in the year 1764 to believe that one can convince one's opponents with arguments printed in books. It is not to do that, therefore, that I have taken up my pen, but merely so as to annoy them, and to bestow strength and courage on those on our own side, and to make it known to the others that they have not convinced us.

Marriage, in contrast to the flu, starts with a fever and ends with the chills.

The human tendency to regard little things as important has produced very many great things.

In each of us there is a little of all of us.

Man is a masterpiece of creation, if only because no amount of determinism can prevent him from believing that he acts as a free being.

If we thought more for ourselves we would have very many more bad books and very many more good ones.

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.

I have remarked very clearly that I am often of one opinion when I am lying down and of another when I am standing up...

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

Ambition and suspicion always go together.

Here take back the stuff that I am, nature, knead it back into the dough of being, make of me a bush, a cloud, whatever you will, even a man, only no longer make me.

To receive applause for works which do not demand all our powers hinders our advance towards a perfecting of our spirit. It usually means that thereafter we stand still.

Man is a masterpiece of creation if for no other reason than that, all the weight of evidence for determinism notwithstanding, he believes he has free will.

We now possess four principles of morality: 1) a philosophical: do good for its own sake, out of respect for the law; 2) a religious: do good because it is God's will, out of love of God; 3) a human: do good because it will promote your happiness, out of self-love; 4) a political: do good because it will promote the welfare of the society of which you are a part, out of love of society having regard to yourself. But is this not all one single principle, only viewed from different sides?

To make astute people believe one is what one is not is, in most cases, harder than actually to become what one wishes to appear.