Georg Christoph Lichtenberg Quotes

Nothing is more conductive to peace of mind than not having any opinions at all.

Once we know our weaknesses they cease to do us any harm.

Affectation is a very good word when someone does not wish to confess to what he would none the less like to believe of himself.

The thoughts written on the walls of madhouses by their inmates might be worth publicizing.

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

It is in the gift for employing all the vicissitudes of life to one's own advantage and to that of one's craft that a large part of genius consists.

For the loss of those we have loved there is no alleviation but time and carefully and rationally chosen diversions such as will not cause our heart to reproach us.

There is no more important rule of conduct in the world than this: attach yourself as much as you can to people who are abler than you and yet not so very different that you cannot understand them.

Es difícil que en el mundo haya mercancía más singular que los libros. Son impresos, vendidos, encuadernados, reseñados y a veces hasta escritos por gente que no los entiende.

We often have need of a profound philosophy to restore to our feelings their original state of innocence, to find our way out of the rubble of things alien to us, to begin to feel for ourselves and to speak ourselves, and I might almost say to exist ourselves. Even if my philosophy does not extend to discovering anything new, it does nevertheless possess the courage to regard as questionable what has long been thought true.

The most dangerous of all falsehoods is a slightly distorted truth.

Siempre he procurado imponerme leyes que sólo entren en vigor cuando me sea casi imposible violarlas.

In his Comedy, Dante Alighieri names Virgil, with many tokens of respect, as his teacher, and yet as Herr Meinhard remarks, makes such ill use of him: clear proof that even in the days of Dante one praised the ancients without knowing why. This respect for poets one does not understand and yet wishes to equal is the source of the bad writing in our literature.

We can see nothing whatever of the soul unless it is visible in the expression of the countenance; one might call the faces at a large assembly of people a history of the human soul written in a kind of Chinese ideograms.

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