Georg C. Lichtenberg
Never undertake anything unless you have the heart to ask Heaven's blessing on your undertaking.Collection: Heart
We judge nothing so hastily as character, and yet there is nothing over which we should be more cautious.... I have always found that the so-called bad people improve on closer acquaintance, while the good fall off.Collection: Fall
Nowadays beautiful women are counted among the talents of their husbands.Collection: Beautiful
A vacuum of ideas affects people differently than a vacuum of air, otherwise readers of books would be constantly collapsing.Collection: Book
Much reading has brought upon us a learned barbarism.Collection: Reading
A good means to discovery is to take away certain parts of a system to find out how the rest behaves.Collection: Mean
One is rarely an impulsive innovator after the age of sixty, but one can still be a very fine orderly and inventive thinker. One rarely procreates children at that age, but one is all the more skilled at educating those who have already been procreated, and education is procreation of another kind.Collection: Time
A book which, above all others in the world, should be forbidden, is a catalogue of forbidden books.Collection: Book
We have to believe that everything has a cause, as the spider spins its web in order to catch flies. But it does this before it knows there are such things as flies.Collection: Believe
If it is permissible to write plays that are not intended to be seen, I should like to see who can prevent me from writing a book no one can read.Collection: Book
There is something in the character of every man which cannot be broken in--the skeleton of his character; and to try to alter this is like training a sheep for draught purposes.Collection: Character
If nature be regarded as the teacher and we poor human beings as her pupils, the human race presents a very curious picture. We all sit together at a lecture and possess the necessary principles for understanding it, yet we always pay more attention to the chatter of our fellow students than to the lecturer's discourse. Or, if our neighbor copies something down, we sneak it from him, stealing what he himself may have heard imperfectly, and add it to our own errors of spelling and opinion.Collection: Teacher
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.Collection: Lying
There is a great difference between believing in something and believing in it again.Collection: Believe
The drive to propagate our race has also propagated a lot of other thingsCollection: Sex
One can live in this world on soothsaying but not on truth saying.Collection: Truth
I look upon book reviews as an infantile disease which new-born books are subject to.Collection: Book
If this is philosophy it is at any rate a philosophy that is not in its right mind.Collection: Philosophy
The excuses we make to ourselves when we want to do something are excellent material for soliloquies, for they are rarely made except when we are alone, and are very often made aloud.Collection: Want
Human pride is a strange thing; it cannot easily be suppressed, and if you stop up hole A will peep forth again in a twinkling from another hole B, and if this is closed it is ready to come out at hole C, and so on.Collection: Pride
It is in most cases more difficult to make intelligent people believe that you are what you are not, than really to become what you would appear to be.Collection: Believe
Do not take too artificial a view of mankind but judge them from a natural standpoint, deeming them neither over good nor over bad.Collection: Views
How might letters be most efficiently copied so that the blind might read them with their fingers?Collection: Science
The "second sight" possessed by the Highlanders in Scotland is actually a foreknowledge of future events. I believe they possess this gift because they don't wear trousers.Collection: Believe
As soon as you know a man to be blind, you imagine that you can see it from his back.Collection: Men
The ordinary man is ruined by the flesh lusting against the spirit; the scholar by the spirit lusting too much against the flesh.Collection: Men
Everyone should study at least enough philosophy and belles-lettres to make his sexual experience more delectable.Collection: Philosophy
I forget most of what I read, just as I do most of what I have eaten, but I know that both contribute no less to the conservation of my mind and my body on that account.Collection: Mind
The wisdom of providence is as much revealed in the rarity of genius, as in the circumstance that not everyone is deaf or blind.Collection: Genius
Most subjects at universities are taught for no other purpose than that they may be re-taught when the students become teachers.Collection: Education
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.Collection: Art
I have never yet met anyone who did not think it was an agreeable sensation to cut tinfoil with scissors.Collection: Cutting
There are people who believe everything is sane and sensible that is done with a solemn face.Collection: Believe
Some people read only because they are too lazy to think.Collection: Reading
God creates the animals, man creates himself.Collection: Animal
Brevity: To say at once whatever is to be said.Collection: Said
It is a great shame; most of our words are misused tools / which often still smell of the mud in which previous owners / desecrated them.Collection: Smell
Do not judge God's world from your own. Trim your own hedge as you wish and plant your flowers in the patterns you can understand, but do not judge the garden of nature from your little window box.Collection: Flower
There can hardly be a stranger commodity in the world than books. Printed by people who don't understand them; sold by people who don't understand them; bound, criticized and read by people who don't understand them; and now even written by people who don't understand them.Collection: Book
Why does a suppurating lung give so little warning and a sore on the finger so much?Collection: Giving
The motives that lead us to do anything might be arranged like the thirty-two winds and might be given names on the same pattern: for instance, "bread-bread-fame" or "fame-fame-bread."Collection: Wind
The construction of the universe is certainly very much easier to explain than is that of the plant.Collection: Science
A man has virtues enough if he deserves pardon for his faults on account of them.Collection: Men
There are people who believe everything is sane and sensible that is done with a solemn face. ... It is no great art to say something briefly when, like Tacitus, one has something to say; when one has nothing to say, however, and none the less writes a whole book and makes truth ... into a liar - that I call an achievement.Collection: Art
Cultivate that kind of knowledge which enables us to discover for ourselves in case of need that which others have to read or be told of.Collection: Needs
What makes our poetry so contemptible nowadays is its paucity of ideas. If you want to be read, invent. Who the Devil wouldn't like to read something new?Collection: Ideas
What concerns me alone I only think, what concerns my friends I tell them, what can be of interest to only a limited public I write, and what the world ought to know is printed.Collection: Writing
Truly, men make too little use of their lives; and so it is no wonder that the world should still be in such a poor way.Collection: Men
It is said that truth comes from the mouths of fools and children: I wish every good mind which feels an inclination for satire would reflect that the finest satirist always has something of both in him.Collection: Children