Georg C. Lichtenberg Quotes - Page 13

What concerns me alone I only think, what concerns my friends I tell them, what can be of interest to only a limited public I write, and what the world ought to know is printed.

If you are going to build something in the air it is always better to build castles than houses of cards.

Truly, men make too little use of their lives; and so it is no wonder that the world should still be in such a poor way.

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

Propositions on which all men are in agreement are true: if they are not true we have no truth at all.

No people are more conceited than those who depict their own feelings, especially if they happen to have a little prose at their command for the occasion.

How few friends would remain friends if each could see the sentiments of the other in their entirety.

The fear of death which is imprinted in men is at the same time a great expedient Heaven employs to hinder them from many misdeeds: many things are left undone for fear of imperiling one's life or health.

The greatest things in the world are brought about by other things which we count as nothing: little causes we overlook but which at length accumulate.

Man is perhaps half mind and half matter in the same way as the polyp is half plant and half animal. The strangest creatures are always found on the border lines of species.

If brandy was made out of sparrows there would soon be no sparrows.

There is something in the character of every man which cannot be broken in--the skeleton of his character; and to try to alter this is like training a sheep for draught purposes.

I believe that man is in the last resort so free a being that his right to be what he believes himself to be cannot be contested.

Knowledge acquired too rapidly and without being personally supplemented is never very productive.

Body and soul: a horse harnessed beside an ox.

Courage, garrulousness and the mob are on our side. What more do we want?

A handful of soldiers is always better than a mouthful of arguments.

What makes our poetry so contemptible nowadays is its paucity of ideas. If you want to be read, invent. Who the Devil wouldn't like to read something new?

It is a sure evidence of a good book if it pleases us more and more as we grow older.

It not seldom happens that in the purposeless rovings and wanderings of the imagination we hunt down such game as can be put to use by our purposeful philosophy in its well-ordered household.

As the few adepts in such things well know, universal morality is to be found in little everyday penny-events just as much as in great ones. There is so much goodness and ingenuity in a raindrop that an apothecary wouldn't let it go for less than half-a-crown.

Many a man who is willing to be shot for his belief in a miracle would have doubted, had he been present at the miracle itself.

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

The most successful tempters and thus the most dangerous are the deluded deluders.

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