Quotes By Georg C. Lichtenberg

I cannot say whether things will get better if we change; what I can say is they must change if they are to get better.

There are very many people who read simply to prevent themselves from thinking.

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

Men still have to be governed by deception.

A handful of soldiers is always better than a mouthful of arguments.

Once we know our weaknesses they cease to do us any harm.

Nothing can contribute more to peace of soul than the lack of any opinion whatever.

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.

Everyone is a genius at least once a year. The real geniuses simply have their bright ideas closer together.

Many things about our bodies would not seem to us so filthy and obscene if we did not have the idea of nobility in our heads.

That man is the noblest creature may also be inferred from the fact that no other creature has yet contested this claim.

The American who first discovered Columbus made a bad discovery.

There is no greater impediment to progress in the sciences than the desire to see it take place too quickly.

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.

Prejudices are so to speak the mechanical instincts of men: through their prejudices they do without any effort many things they would find too difficult to think through to the point of resolving to do them.