Georg C. Lichtenberg
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.
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.
If you are going to build something in the air it is always better to build castles than houses of cards.
What is the good of drawing conclusions from experience? I don't deny we sometimes draw the right conclusions, but don't we just as often draw the wrong ones?
We cannot remember too often that when we observe nature, and especially the ordering of nature, it is always ourselves alone we are observing.
The fly that doesn't want to be swatted is most secure when it lights on the fly-swatter.
If all else fails, the character of a man can be recognized by nothing so surely as by a jest which he takes badly.
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.
Prejudices are so to speak the mechanical instincts of men: through their prejudices they do without any effort many things they would find too difficult to think through to the point of resolving to do them.
There is no greater impediment to progress in the sciences than the desire to see it take place too quickly.
Nothing reveals a man's character better than the kind of joke at which he takes offense.Collection: Humor
It often takes more courage to change one's opinion than to stick to it.Collection: Change
Marriage, in contrast to the flu, starts with a fever and ends with the chills.Collection: Fever
One's first step in wisdom is to question everything - and one's last is to come to terms with everything.Collection: Inspirational
Ask yourself always: how can this be done better?Collection: Inspirational
The greatest events occur without intention playing any part in them; chance makes good mistakes and undoes the most carefully planned undertaking. The world's greatest events are not produced, they happen.Collection: Mistake
The feeling of health can only be gained by sickness.Collection: Feelings
Nothing puts a greater obstacle in the way of the progress of knowledge than thinking that one knows what one does not yet know.Collection: Ignorance
The worst thing you can possibly do is worrying and thinking about what you could have done.Collection: Happiness
There is no more important rule of conduct in the world than this: attach yourself as much as you can to people who are abler than you and yet not so very different that you cannot understand them.Collection: People
It is almost impossible to carry the torch of truth through a crowd without singeing somebody's beard.Collection: Torches
Love is blind, but marriage restores its sight.Collection: Funny
If all mankind were suddenly to practice honesty, many thousands of people would be sure to starve.Collection: Honesty
To do just the opposite is also a form of imitation.Collection: Education
Man…who lives in three places – in the past, in the present, and in the future – can be unhappy if one of these three is worthless. Religion has even added a fourth – eternity.Collection: Past
The great rule: 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.Collection: Science
It is strange that only extraordinary men make the discoveries, which later appear so easy and simple.Collection: Simple
One has to do something new in order to see something new.Collection: Science
As nations improve, so do their gods.Collection: Nations
Non cogitant, ergo non sunt.Collection: Science
The rules of grammar are mere human statutes, which is why when he speaks out of the possessed the Devil himself speaks bad Latin.Collection: Latin
An hour-glass is a reminder not only of time's quick flight, but also of the dust to which we must at last returnCollection: Glasses
The grave is still the best shelter against the storms of destiny.Collection: Destiny
How happily some people would live if they troubled themselves as little about other people's business as about their own.Collection: People
With most men, unbelief in one thing springs from blind belief in another.Collection: Spring
A man always writes absolutely well whenever he writes in his own manner, but the wigmaker who tries to write like Gellert ... writes badly.Collection: Writing
Those who have racked their brains to discover new proofs have perhaps been induced to do so by a compulsion they could not quite explain to themselves. Instead of giving us their new proofs they should have explained to us the motivation that constrained them to search for them.Collection: Motivation
The lower classes of men, though they do not think it worthwhile to record what they perceive, nevertheless perceive everything that is worth noting; the difference between them and a man of learning often consists in nothing more than the latter's facility for expression.Collection: Thinking
One of the greatest and also the commonest of faults is for men to believe that, because they never hear their shortcomings spoken of, or read about them in cold print, others can have no knowledge of them.Collection: Believe
We now possess four principles of morality: 1) a philosophical: do good for its own sake, out of respect for the law; 2) a religious: do good because it is God's will, out of love of God; 3) a human: do good because it will promote your happiness, out of self-love; 4) a political: do good because it will promote the welfare of the society of which you are a part, out of love of society having regard to yourself. But is this not all one single principle, only viewed from different sides?Collection: Religious
Above all things expand the frontiers of science: without this the rest counts for nothing.Collection: Science
When a book and a head collide and a hollow sound is heard, must it always have come from the book?Collection: Book
How did mankind ever come by the idea of liberty? What a grand thought it was!Collection: Ideas
You can make a good living from soothsaying but not from truthsaying.Collection: Astrology
Do not say hypothesis, and even less theory: say way of thinking.Collection: Science
To make a vow is a greater sin than to break one.Collection: Sin
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.Collection: Men
One of the greatest creations of the human mind is the art of reviewing books without having read them.Collection: Art
To many people virtue consists chiefly in repenting faults, not in avoiding them.Collection: Integrity