Georg C. Lichtenberg

A person reveals his character by nothing so clearly as the joke he resents.

God created man in His own image, says the Bible; philosophers reverse the process: they create God in theirs.

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

It often takes more courage to change one's opinion than to stick to it.

We accumulate our opinions at an age when our understanding is at its weakest.

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

Man is to be found in reason, God in the passions.

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

The fly that doesn't want to be swatted is most secure when it lights on the fly-swatter.

The writer who cannot sometimes throw away a thought about which another man would have written dissertations, without worry whether or not the reader will find it, will never become a great writer.

Even truth needs to be clad in new garments if it is to appeal to a new age.

Cautiousness in judgment is nowadays to be recommended to each and every one: if we gained only one incontestable truth every ten years from each of our philosophical writers the harvest we reaped would be sufficient.

Nothing puts a greater obstacle in the way of the progress of knowledge than thinking that one knows what one does not yet know.

If it were true what in the end would be gained? Nothing but another truth. Is this such a mighty advantage? We have enough old truths still to digest, and even these we would be quite unable to endure if we did not sometimes flavor them with lies.

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.

To make astute people believe one is what one is not is, in most cases, harder than actually to become what one wishes to appear.

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

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

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

He swallowed a lot of wisdom, but all of it seems to have gone down the wrong way.

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.