Georg C. Lichtenberg

“Even truth needs to be clad in new garments if it is to appeal to a new age.”

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

“I cannot say whether things will get better if we change what I can say is they must change if they are to get better.”

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

“Much can be inferred about a man from his mistress: in her one beholds his weaknesses and his dreams.”

“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?”

“God created man in His own image, says the Bible philosophers reverse the process: they create God in theirs.”

“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.”

“Everyone is a genius at least once a year. The real geniuses simply have their bright ideas closer together.”

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

“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.”

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

“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.”

“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 me.”

“The noble simplicity in the works of nature only too often originates in the noble shortsightedness of him who observes it.”

“Nothing is more conducive to peace of mind than not having any opinion at all.”

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

“Perhaps in time the so-called Dark Ages will be thought of as including our own.”

“We have no words for speaking of wisdom to the stupid. He who understands the wise is wise already.”

“It is almost everywhere the case that soon after it is begotten the greater part of human wisdom is laid to rest in repositories.”