Georg Christoph Lichtenberg Quotes

If it were true what in the end would be gained? Nothing but another truth. Is this such a mighty advantage? We have enough old truths still to digest, and even these we would be quite unable to endure if we did not sometimes flavor them with lies.

Body and soul: a horse harnessed beside an ox.

We are obliged to regard many of our original minds as crazy — at least until we have become as clever as they are.

To do the opposite of something is also a form of imitation, namely an imitation of its opposite.

Cultivate that kind of knowledge which enables us to discover for ourselves in case of need that which others have to read or be told of.

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?

That man is the noblest creature may also be inferred from the fact that no other creature has yet contested this claim.

The journalists have constructed for themselves a little wooden chapel, which they also call the Temple of Fame, in which they put up and take down portraits all day long and make such a hammering you can't hear yourself speak.

Many things about our bodies would not seem to us so filthy and obscene if we did not have the idea of nobility in our heads.

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

The pleasures of the imagination are as it were only drawings and models which are played with by poor people who cannot afford the real thing.

Once the good man was dead, one wore his hat and another his sword as he had worn them, a third had himself barbered as he had, a fourth walked as he did, but the honest man that he was — nobody any longer wanted to be that.

Erudition can produce foliage without bearing fruit.

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.

Do not commence your exercises in philosophy in those regions where an error can deliver you over to the executioner.