Explore Quotes by Georg C. Lichtenberg

The construction of the universe is certainly very much easier to explain than is that of the plant.

Love is blind, but marriage restores its sight.

If we make a couple of discoveries here and there we need not believe things will go on like this for ever. Just as we hit water when we dig in the earth, so we discover the incomprehensible sooner or later.

If an angel were to tell us about his philosophy, I believe many of his statements might well sound like '2 x 2= 13'.

We can see nothing whatever of the soul unless it is visible in the expression of the countenance; one might call the faces at a large assembly of people a history of the human soul written in a kind of Chinese ideograms.

Good taste is either that which agrees with my taste or that which subjects itself to the rule of reason. From this we can see how useful it is to employ reason in seeking out the laws of taste.

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.

I have remarked very clearly that I am often of one opinion when I am lying down and of another when I am standing up.

What most clearly characterizes true freedom and its true employment is its misemployment.

Ambition and suspicion always go together.

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.

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.

It is a question whether, when we break a murderer on the wheel, we do not fall into the error a child makes when it hits the chair it has bumped into.

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

The most perfect ape cannot draw an ape; only man can do that; but, likewise, only man regards the ability to do this as a sign of superiority.

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

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.

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

It is in the gift for employing all the vicissitudes of life to one's own advantage and to that of one's craft that a large part of genius consists.

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.

Never undertake anything for which you wouldn't have the courage to ask the blessings of heaven.