Quotes By Georg C. Lichtenberg

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.

The sure conviction that we could if we wanted to is the reason so many good minds are idle.

What is called an acute knowledge of human nature is mostly nothing but the observer's own weaknesses reflected back from others.

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?

I believe that man is in the last resort so free a being that his right to be what he believes himself to be cannot be contested.

To be content with life or to live merrily, rather all that is required is that we bestow on all things only a fleeting, superficial glance; the more thoughtful we become the more earnest we grow.

Nowadays three witty turns of phrase and a lie make a writer.

With a pen in my hand I have successfully stormed bulwarks from which others armed with sword and excommunication have been repulsed.

Just as we outgrow a pair of trousers, we outgrow acquaintances, libraries, principles, etc., at times before they're worn out and times - and this is the worst of all - before we have new ones.

We say that someone occupies an official position, whereas it is the official position that occupies him.

Perhaps in time the so-called Dark Ages will be thought of as including our own.

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.

Sickness is mankind's greatest defect.

There exists a species of transcendental ventriloquism by means of which men can be made to believe that something said on earth comes from Heaven.

The noble simplicity in the works of nature only too often originates in the noble shortsightedness of him who observes it.