Famous Quotes

Quotes by Georg C Lichtenberg

• Even truth needs to be clad in new garments if it is to appeal to a new age.
• Everyone is a genius at least once a year. The real geniuses simply have their bright ideas closer together.
• God created man in His own image, says the Bible philosophers reverse the process: they create God in theirs.
• 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.
• 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.
• It is almost everywhere the case that soon after it is begotten the greater part of human wisdom is laid to rest in repositories.
• Much can be inferred about a man from his mistress: in her one beholds his weaknesses and his dreams.
• Never undertake anything for which you wouldn't have the courage to ask the blessings of heaven.
• Nothing can contribute more to peace of soul than the lack of any opinion whatever.
• Nothing is more conducive to peace of mind than not having any opinion at all.
• One must judge men not by their opinions, but by what their opinions have made of them.
• Perhaps in time the so-called Dark Ages will be thought of as including our own.
• 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.
• 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.
• The noble simplicity in the works of nature only too often originates in the noble shortsightedness of him who observes it.
• 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.
• We accumulate our opinions at an age when our understanding is at its weakest.
• We cannot remember too often that when we observe nature, and especially the ordering of nature, it is always ourselves alone we are observing.
• We have no words for speaking of wisdom to the stupid. He who understands the wise is wise already.
• 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?