Georg Christoph Lichtenberg Quotes
A German scientist, satirist and philosopher.
(1742 - 1799)
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A book is a mirror: if an ape looks into it an apostle is hardly likely to look out.
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A clever child brought up with a foolish one can itself become foolish. Man is so perfectable and corruptible he can become a fool through good sense.
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A handful of soldiers is always better than a mouthful of arguments.
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A person reveals his character by nothing so clearly as the joke he resents.
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Actual aristocracy cannot be abolished by any law: all the law can do is decree how it is to be imparted and who is to acquire it.
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Affectation is a very good word when someone does not wish to confess to what he would none the less like to believe of himself.
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As I take up my pen I feel myself so full, so equal to my subject, and see my book so clearly before me in embryo, I would almost like to try to say it all in a single word.
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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.
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Astronomy is perhaps the science whose discoveries owe least to chance, in which human understanding appears in its whole magnitude, and through which man can best learn how small he is.
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Bad writers are those who try to express their own feeble ideas in the language of good ones.
[Writing]
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Barbaric accuracy - whimpering humility.
[Capitalism]
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Be wary of passing the judgment: obscure. To find something obscure poses no difficult, elephants and poodles find many things obscure.
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Body and soul: a horse harnessed beside an ox.
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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. ... 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.
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Courage, garrulousness and the mob are on our side. What more do we want?
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Delight at having understood a very abstract and obscure system leads most people to believe in the truth of what it demonstrates.
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Doubt must be no more than vigilance, otherwise it can become dangerous.
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Erudition can produce foliage without bearing fruit.
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Even truth needs to be clad in new garments if it is to appeal to a new age.
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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.
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