Explore Quotes by Georg C. Lichtenberg

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.

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.

Delight at having understood a very abstract and obscure system leads most people to believe in the truth of what it demonstrates.

With prophecies the commentator is often a more important man than the prophet.

With most people disbelief in a thing is founded on a blind belief in some other thing.

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

With most men, unbelief in one thing springs from blind belief in another.

It is almost impossible to carry the torch of truth through a crowd without singeing somebody's beard.

It is almost everywhere the case that soon after it is begotten the greater part of human wisdom is laid to rest in repositories.

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

Above all things expand the frontiers of science: without this the rest counts for nothing.

A good method of discovery is to imagine certain members of a system removed and then see how what is left would behave: for example, where would we be if iron were absent from the world: this is an old example.

As the few adepts in such things well know, universal morality is to be found in little everyday penny-events just as much as in great ones. There is so much goodness and ingenuity in a raindrop that an apothecary wouldn't let it go for less than half-a-crown.

The journalists have constructed for themselves a little wooden chapel, which they also call the Temple of Fame, in which they put up and take down portraits all day long and make such a hammering you can't hear yourself speak.

An hour-glass is a reminder not only of time's quick flight, but also of the dust to which we must at last return

Erudition can produce foliage without bearing fruit.

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.

Doubt everything at least once, even the sentence "Two times two is four."

Pain warns us not to exert our limbs to the point of breaking them. How much knowledge would we not need to recognize this by the exercise of mere reason.

People who have read a good deal rarely make great discoveries. I do not say this in excuse of laziness, but because invention presupposes an extensive independent contemplation of things.

With God thoughts are colors, with us they are pigments-even the most abstract one may be accompanied by physical pain.