Georg Christoph Lichtenberg Quotes

The sure conviction that we could if we wanted to is the reason so many good minds are idle.

Is it not strange that men are so keen to fight for religion and so unkeen to live according to its precepts?

Some people come by the name of genius in the same way that certain insects come by the name of centipede — not because they have a hundred feet, but because most people can't count above 14.

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

Much reading has brought upon us a learned barbarism

There is something in our minds like sunshine and the weather, which is not under our control. When I write, the best things come to me from I know not where.

It is impossible to have bad taste, but many people have none at all.

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

Love is blind, but marriage restores its sight.

Just as there are polysyllabic words that say very little, so there are also monosyllabic words of infinite meaning.

To make clever people believe we are what we are not is in most instances harder than really to become what we want to seem to be.

Delight at having understood a very abstract and obscure system leads most people to believe in the truth of what it demonstrates.

What I do not like about our definitions of genius is that there is in them nothing of the day of judgment, nothing of resounding through eternity and nothing of the footsteps of the Almighty.

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.

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.