Georg C. Lichtenberg Quotes - Page 10

Superstition originates among ordinary people in the early and all too zealous instruction they receive in religion: they hear of mysteries, miracles, deeds of the Devil, and consider it very probable that things of this sort could occur in everything anywhere.

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.

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.

Do not take too artificial a view of mankind but judge them from a natural standpoint, deeming them neither over good nor over bad.

The girl who reveals herself heart and soul to her friend reveals the secrets of the entire sex; for every girl is the guardian of the feminine mysteries.

To see every day how people get the name 'genius' just as the wood-lice in the cellar the name 'millipede'-not because they have that many feet, but because most people don't want to count to 14-this has had the result that I don't believe anyone any more without checking.

A good metaphor is something even the police should keep an eye on.

A clever child brought up with a foolish one can itself become foolish. Man is so perfectible and corruptible he can become a fool through good sense.

In each of us there is a little of all of us.

Man is a masterpiece of creation, if only because no amount of determinism can prevent him from believing that he acts as a free being.

If we thought more for ourselves we would have very many more bad books and very many more good ones.

The American who first discovered Columbus made a bad discovery.

One cannot demand of a scholar that he show himself a scholar everywhere in society, but the whole tenor of his behavior must none the less betray the thinker, he must always be instructive, his way of judging a thing must even in the smallest matters be such that people can see what it will amount to when, quietly and self-collected, he puts this power to scholarly use.

If an angel were to tell us about his philosophy, I believe many of his statements might well sound like '2 x 2= 13'.

Do we write books so that they shall merely be read? Don't we also write them for employment in the household? For one that is read from start to finish, thousands are leafed through, other thousands lie motionless, others are jammed against mouseholes, thrown at rats, others are stood on, sat on, drummed on, have gingerbread baked on them or are used to light pipes.

We can see nothing whatever of the soul unless it is visible in the expression of the countenance; one might call the faces at a large assembly of people a history of the human soul written in a kind of Chinese ideograms.

He was always smoothing and polishing himself, and in the end he became blunt before he was sharp.

A writer who wishes to be read by posterity must not be averse to putting hints which might give rise to whole books, or ideas for learned discussions, in some corner of a chapter so that one should think he can afford to throw them away by the thousand.

With prophecies the commentator is often a more important man than the prophet.

All mathematical laws which we find in Nature are always suspect to me, in spite of their beauty. They give me no pleasure. They are merely auxiliaries. At close range it is all not true.

The fly that doesn't want to be swatted is most secure when it lights on the fly-swatter.

People who have read a good deal rarely make great discoveries. I do not say this in excuse of laziness, but because invention presupposes an extensive independent contemplation of things.

Affectation is a very good word when someone does not wish to confess to what he would none the less like to believe of himself.

With God thoughts are colors, with us they are pigments-even the most abstract one may be accompanied by physical pain.

Imagine the world so greatly magnified that particles of light look like twenty-four-pound cannon balls.