Georg C. Lichtenberg Quotes - Page 12

Many intelligent people, when about to write . . . , force on their minds a certain notion about style, just as they screw up their faces when they sit for their portraits.

One can live in this world on soothsaying but not on truth saying.

Good taste is either that which agrees with my taste or that which subjects itself to the rule of reason. From this we can see how useful it is to employ reason in seeking out the laws of taste.

How might letters be most efficiently copied so that the blind might read them with their fingers?

The wisdom of providence is as much revealed in the rarity of genius, as in the circumstance that not everyone is deaf or blind.

Perhaps pure reason without heart would never have thought of God.

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.

I have never yet met anyone who did not think it was an agreeable sensation to cut tinfoil with scissors.

Everyone should study at least enough philosophy and belles-lettres to make his sexual experience more delectable.

There can hardly be a stranger commodity in the world than books. Printed by people who don't understand them; sold by people who don't understand them; bound, criticized and read by people who don't understand them; and now even written by people who don't understand them.

Everyone is a genius at least once a year.

A person reveals his character by nothing so clearly as the joke he resents.

Just as there are polysyllabic words that say very little, so there are also monosyllabic words of infinite meaning.

The motives that lead us to do anything might be arranged like the thirty-two winds and might be given names on the same pattern: for instance, "bread-bread-fame" or "fame-fame-bread."

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 stupidity.

One should never trust a person who, while assuring you of something, puts his hands on his heart.

It is a great shame; most of our words are misused tools / which often still smell of the mud in which previous owners / desecrated them.

God creates the animals, man creates himself.

Why does a suppurating lung give so little warning and a sore on the finger so much?

Brevity: To say at once whatever is to be said.

To err is human also in so far as animals seldom or never err, or at least only the cleverest of them do so.

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

Do not judge God's world from your own. Trim your own hedge as you wish and plant your flowers in the patterns you can understand, but do not judge the garden of nature from your little window box.

The most heated defenders of a science, who cannot endure the slightest sneer at it, are commonly those who have not made very much progress in it and are secretly aware of this defect.

The highest point to which a weak but experienced mind can rise is detecting the weakness of better men.