Georg C. Lichtenberg Quotes

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.

Once we know our weaknesses they cease to do us any harm.

It often takes more courage to change one's opinion than to stick to it.

One's first step in wisdom is to question everything - and one's last is to come to terms with everything.

You can make a good living from soothsaying but not from truthsaying.

Marriage, in contrast to the flu, starts with a fever and ends with the chills.

Nothing reveals a man's character better than the kind of joke at which he takes offense.

Love is blind, but marriage restores its sight.

The feeling of health can only be gained by sickness.

To make a vow is a greater sin than to break one.

We accumulate our opinions at an age when our understanding is at its weakest.

There are very many people who read simply to prevent themselves from thinking.

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

Ask yourself always: how can this be done better?

Nothing puts a greater obstacle in the way of the progress of knowledge than thinking that one knows what one does not yet know.

The most dangerous untruths are truths slightly distorted.

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

The worst thing you can possibly do is worrying and thinking about what you could have done.

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.

To do just the opposite is also a form of imitation.

It is almost impossible to carry the torch of truth through a crowd without singeing somebody's beard.

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.

If all mankind were suddenly to practice honesty, many thousands of people would be sure to starve.

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.

I ceased in the year 1764 to believe that one can convince one’s opponents with arguments printed in books. It is not to do that, therefore, that I have taken up my pen, but merely so as to annoy them, and to bestow strength and courage on those on our own side, and to make it known to the others that they have not convinced us.