Georg Christoph Lichtenberg Quotes

I have written a good number of drafts and small reflections. They are not waiting for the last touch but for the sunlight to wake them up.

I believe that some of the greatest minds that ever lived had not read half as much and did not know nearly as much as some of our mediocre scholars. And some 20 of our verr mediocre scholars could have become greater men if they had not read so much.

To make a vow is a greater sin than to break one.

Nothing is more inimical to the progress of science than the belief that we know what we do not yet know.

El simio más perfecto no puede dibujar un simio. Sólo el hombre puede hacerlo. Pero también sólo él lo considera una ventaja.

I would give something to know for precisely whom the deeds were really done, of which it is publicly stated they were done 'for the Fatherland'.

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

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.

Translation: With most men, unbelief in one thing springs from blind belief in another.

Before one blames, one should always find out whether one cannot excuse. To discover little faults has been always the particularity of such brains that are a little or not at all above the average. The superior ones keep quiet or say something against the whole and the great minds transform without blaming.

Every condition of the soul has its own sign and expression...So you will see how hard it is to seem original without being so.

Doubt must be no more than vigilance, otherwise it can become dangerous.

Cuando releo mis viejos cuadernos de reflexiones, a veces doy con una idea propia que me satisface. Me sorprende que una idea se pueda volver tan ajena para mí y mi sistema, y me alegro tanto como si se le hubiera ocurrido a un antepasado.

Of all the inventions of man I doubt whether any was more easily accomplished than that of a Heaven.

Erudition can produce foliage without bearing fruit.