Johann Kaspar Lavater Quotes - Page 3

What knowledge is there of which man is capable that is not founded on the exterior,--the relation that exists between visible and invisible, the perceptible and the imperceptible?

Learn the value of a man's words and expressions, and you know him. Each man has a measure of his own for everything; this he offers you inadvertently in his words. He who has a superlative for everything wants a measure for the great or small.

If you mean to know yourself, interline such of these aphorisms as affect you agreeably in reading, and set a mark to such as left a sense of uneasiness with you; and then show your copy to whom you please.

How few our real wants, and how vast our imaginary ones!

Neatness begets order; but from order to taste there is the same difference as from taste to genius, or from love to friendship.

Where pride begins, love ceases.

A fop of fashion is the mercer's friend, the tailor's fool, and his own foe.

Where there is much pretension, much has been borrowed; nature never pretends.

The prudent see only the difficulties, the bold only the advantages, of a great enterprise; the hero sees both; diminishes the former and makes the latter preponderate, and so conquers.

Who recollects distinctly his past adventures, knows his destiny to come.

Let none turn over books, or roam the stars in quest of God, who sees him not in man.

Three days of uninterrupted company in a vehicle will make you better acquainted with another, than one hour's conversation with him every day for three years.

He who, in questions of right, virtue, or duty, sets himself above all ridicule, is truly great, and shall laugh in the end with truer mirth than ever he was laughed at.

The proportion of genius to the vulgar is like one to a million.

What do I owe to my times, to my country, to my neighbors, to my friends? Such are the questions which a virtuous man ought often to ask himself.

Strange that cowards cannot see that their greatest safety lies in dauntless courage.

Faces are as legible as books, only with these circumstances to recommend them to our perusal, that they are read in much less time, and are much less likely to deceive us.

As man's love or hatred, so he. Love and hatred exist only personified.

Many very intelligent agreeable persons have warts on the forehead, not brown, nor very large, between the eyebrows, which have nothing in them offensive or disgusting. - But a large brown wart on the upper lip, especially when it is bristly, will be found in no person who is not defective in something essential, or at least remarkable for some conspicuous failing.

Receive no satisfaction for premeditated impertinence - forget it, forgive it - but keep him inexorably at a distance who of∣fered it.

Evasions are the common shelter of the hard-hearted, the false, and impotent, when called upon to assist; the real great alone plan instantaneous help, even when their looks or words presage difficulties.

Habit is altogether too arbitrary a master for me to submit to.

The loss of taste for what is right is loss of all right taste.

Say not you know another entirely till you have divided an inheritance with him.

The humblest star twinkles most in the darkest night.