Georg Christoph Lichtenberg Quotes

¿Es nuestro concepto de Dios algo más que una personificación de lo incomprensible?

Ideas too are a life and a world.

It is said that truth comes from the mouths of fools and children: I wish every good mind which feels an inclination for satire would reflect that the finest satirist always has something of both in him.

Man…who lives in three places – in the past, in the present, and in the future – can be unhappy if one of these three is worthless. Religion has even added a fourth – eternity.

The excuses we make to ourselves when we want to do something are excellent material for soliloquies, for they are rarely made except when we are alone, and are very often made aloud.

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

Man can acquire accomplishments or he can become an animal, whichever he wants. God makes the animals, man makes himself.

Wouldn't things look much better for the human race if we no longer had history, at least no political history? The human being then would act more in accordance with the energies he possesses at any given time; for as things stand today, the example that now and then makes one person better makes a thousand others worse.

Astronomy is perhaps the science whose discoveries owe least to chance, in which human understanding appears in its whole magnitude, and through which man can best learn how small he is.

Je mehr man in einer Sprache durch Vernunft unterscheiden lernt, desto schwerer wird einem das Sprechen derselben. Im Fertig-Sprechen ist viel Instinktmäßiges, durch Vernunft läßt es sich nicht erreichen.

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 of our very mediocre scholars could have become greater men if they had not read so much.

Even truth needs to be clad in new garments if it is to appeal to a new age.

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.

I cannot say whether things will get better if we change; what I can say is that they must change if they are to get better.