Explore Quotes by Georg C. Lichtenberg

If you are going to build something in the air it is always better to build castles than houses of cards.

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.

We cannot remember too often that when we observe nature, and especially the ordering of nature, it is always ourselves alone we are observing.

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

A handful of soldiers is always better than a mouthful of arguments.

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

When an acquaintance goes by I often step back from my window, not so much to spare him the effort of acknowledging me as to spare myself the embarrassment of seeing that he has not done so.

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

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

The most dangerous untruths are truths slightly distorted.

To do the opposite of something is also a form of imitation, namely an imitation of its opposite.

Every man has his moral backside which he refrains from showing unless he has to and keeps covered as long as possible with the trousers of decorum.

Man loves company - even if it is only that of a small burning candle.

Be wary of passing the judgment: obscure. To find something obscure poses no difficult, elephants and poodles find many things obscure.

Men still have to be governed by deception.

A book is a mirror: if an ape looks into it an apostle is hardly likely to look out.

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.

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

Once we know our weaknesses they cease to do us any harm.

One must judge men not by their opinions, but by what their opinions have made of them.

Just as the performance of the vilest and most wicked deeds requires spirit and talent, so even the greatest demand a certain insensitivity which under other circumstances we would call stupidity.