Georg C. Lichtenberg Quotes - Page 11

Actual aristocracy cannot be abolished by any law: all the law can do is decree how it is to be imparted and who is to acquire it.

What a blessing it would be if we could open and shut our ears...as easily as we open and shut our eyes.

He swallowed a lot of wisdom, but all of it seems to have gone down the wrong way.

Cautiousness in judgment is nowadays to be recommended to each and every one: if we gained only one incontestable truth every ten years from each of our philosophical writers the harvest we reaped would be sufficient.

First there is a time when we believe everything, then for a little while we believe with discrimination, then we believe nothing whatever, and then we believe everything again - and, moreover, give reasons why we believe.

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?

He who says he hates every kind of flattery, and says it in earnest, certainly does not yet know every kind of flattery.

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

Reason now gazes above the realm of the dark but warm feelings as the Alpine peaks do above the clouds. They behold the sun more clearly and distinctly, but they are cold and unfruitful.

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.

As soon as you know a man to be blind, you imagine that you can see it from his back.

The ordinary man is ruined by the flesh lusting against the spirit; the scholar by the spirit lusting too much against the flesh.

To make astute people believe one is what one is not is, in most cases, harder than actually to become what one wishes to appear.

If there were only turnips and potatoes in the world, someone would complain that plants grow the wrong way.

He was then in his fifty-fourth year, when even in the case of poets reason and passion begin to discuss a peace treaty and usually conclude it not very long afterwards.

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.

Most subjects at universities are taught for no other purpose than that they may be re-taught when the students become teachers.

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.

There are people who believe everything is sane and sensible that is done with a solemn face.

Some people come by the name of genius in the same way that certain insects come by the name of centipede -- not because they have a hundred feet, but because most people can't count above 14.

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.

One of our forefathers must have read a forbidden book.

Some people read only because they are too lazy to think.

There were honest people long before there were Christians and there are, God be praised, still honest people where there are no Christians. It could therefore easily be possible that people are Christians because true Christianity corresponds to what they would have been even if Christianity did not exist.

The celebrated painter Gainsborough got as much pleasure from seeing violins as from hearing them.