Georg C. Lichtenberg

“With most people disbelief in a thing is founded on a blind belief in some other thing.”

“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.”

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

“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.”

“Erudition can produce foliage without bearing fruit.”

“Many things about our bodies would not seem to us so filthy and obscene if we did not have the idea of nobility in our heads.”

“One might call habit a moral friction: something that prevents the mind from gliding over things but connects it with them and makes it hard for it to free itself from them.”

“To receive applause for works which do not demand all our powers hinders our advance towards a perfecting of our spirit. It usually means that thereafter we stand still.”

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

“There is no greater impediment to progress in the sciences than the desire to see it take place too quickly.”

“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 stup...”

“If all else fails, the character of a man can be recognized by nothing so surely as by a jest which he takes badly.”

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

“We say that someone occupies an official position, whereas it is the official position that occupies him.”

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

“I am convinced we do not only love ourselves in others but hate ourselves in others too.”

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

“There are people who possess not so much genius as a certain talent for perceiving the desires of the century, or even of the decade, before it has done so itself.”

“Virtue by premeditation isn't worth much.”

“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.”