Georg C. Lichtenberg Quotes
-
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 me.
-
Virtue by premeditation isn't worth much.
-
If you are going to build something in the air it is always better to build castles than houses of cards.
-
One might call habit a moral friction: something that prevents the mind from gliding over things but connects it with them and makes it hard for it to free itself from them.
-
He who says he hates every kind of flattery, and says it in earnest, certainly does not yet know every kind of flattery.
-
That man is the noblest creature may also be inferred from the fact that no other creature has yet contested this claim.
-
We have no words for speaking of wisdom to the stupid. He who understands the wise is wise already.
-
The most perfect ape cannot draw an ape; only man can do that; but, likewise, only man regards the ability to do this as a sign of superiority.
-
The sure conviction that we could if we wanted to is the reason so many good minds are idle.
-
Sickness is mankind's greatest defect.
-
Perhaps in time the so-called Dark Ages will be thought of as including our own.
-
Be wary of passing the judgment: obscure. To find something obscure poses no difficult, elephants and poodles find many things obscure.
-
If the little bit you have is nothing special in itself, at least find a way of saying it that is a little bit special.
-
Even truth needs to be clad in new garments if it is to appeal to a new age.
-
The Greeks possessed a knowledge of human nature we seem hardly able to attain to without passing through the strengthening hibernation of a new barbarism.
-
Doubt must be no more than vigilance, otherwise it can become dangerous.
-
With a pen in my hand I have successfully stormed bulwarks from which others armed with sword and excommunication have been repulsed.
-
We are obliged to regard many of our original minds as crazy at least until we have become as clever as they are.
-
God created man in His own image, says the Bible; philosophers reverse the process: they create God in theirs.
-
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.
-
The pleasures of the imagination are as it were only drawings and models which are played with by poor people who cannot afford the real thing.
-
One must judge men not by their opinions, but by what their opinions have made of them.
-
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.
-
Nothing can contribute more to peace of soul than the lack of any opinion whatever.