Georg C. Lichtenberg Quotes
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The fly that doesn't want to be swatted is most secure when it lights on the fly-swatter.
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That man is the noblest creature may also be inferred from the fact that no other creature has yet contested this claim.
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We have no words for speaking of wisdom to the stupid. He who understands the wise is wise already.
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Men still have to be governed by deception.
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He who says he hates every kind of flattery, and says it in earnest, certainly does not yet know every kind of flattery.
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Every man has his moral backside which he refrains from showing unless he has to and keeps covered as long as possible with the trousers of decorum.
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Sickness is mankind's greatest defect.
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One must judge men not by their opinions, but by what their opinions have made of them.
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Be wary of passing the judgment: obscure. To find something obscure poses no difficult, elephants and poodles find many things obscure.
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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.
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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.
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The noble simplicity in the works of nature only too often originates in the noble shortsightedness of him who observes it.
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If you are going to build something in the air it is always better to build castles than houses of cards.
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Virtue by premeditation isn't worth much.
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We are obliged to regard many of our original minds as crazy at least until we have become as clever as they are.
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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.
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Even truth needs to be clad in new garments if it is to appeal to a new age.
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A handful of soldiers is always better than a mouthful of arguments.
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God created man in His own image, says the Bible; philosophers reverse the process: they create God in theirs.
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Doubt must be no more than vigilance, otherwise it can become dangerous.
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Perhaps in time the so-called Dark Ages will be thought of as including our own.
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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.
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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.
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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.