German scientist & satirist (1742-1799)
There are people who can believe anything they wish. What lucky creatures!
GEORG CHRISTOPH LICHTENBERG
The Reflections of Lichtenberg
Do not commence your exercises in philosophy in those regions where an error can deliver you over to the executioner.
GEORG CHRISTOPH LICHTENBERG
"Notebook C", Aphorisms
Where moderation is a fault indifference is a crime.
GEORG CHRISTOPH LICHTENBERG
The Reflections of Lichtenberg
Every man also has his moral backside which he refrains from showing unless he has to and keeps covered as long as possible with the trousers of decorum.
GEORG CHRISTOPH LICHTENBERG
"Notebook B", The Waste Books
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.
GEORG CHRISTOPH LICHTENBERG
"Notebook F", Aphorisms
Do not take too artificial a view of mankind but judge them from a natural standpoint, deeming them neither over good nor over bad.
GEORG CHRISTOPH LICHTENBERG
The Reflections of Lichtenberg
He who understands the wise is wise already.
GEORG CHRISTOPH LICHTENBERG
"Notebook E", Aphorisms
What we are able to judge with feeling is very little; the rest is all prejudice and complaisance.
GEORG CHRISTOPH LICHTENBERG
The Reflections of Lichtenberg
Some theories are good for nothing except to be argued about.
G. C. LICHTENBERG
attributed, 20,000 Quips & Quotes
It is a question whether, when we break a murderer on the wheel, we do not fall into the error a child makes when it hits the chair it has bumped into.
GEORG CHRISTOPH LICHTENBERG
"Notebook J", Aphorisms
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.
GEORG CHRISTOPH LICHTENBERG
"Notebook E", Aphorisms
Superstition originates among ordinary people in the early and all too zealous instruction they receive in religion: they hear of mysteries, miracles, deeds of the Devil, and consider it very probable that things of this sort could occur in everything anywhere.
GEORG CHRISTOPH LICHTENBERG
The Waste Books
How happily some people would live if they troubled themselves as little about other people's business as about their own.
GEORG CHRISTOPH LICHTENBERG
The Reflections of Lichtenberg
It is hardly to be believed how spiritual reflections when mixed with a little physics can hold people's attention and give them a livelier idea of God than do the often ill-applied examples of his wrath.
GEORG CHRISTOPH LICHTENBERG
"Notebook A", Aphorisms
One of the greatest and also the commonest of faults is for men to believe that, because they never hear their shortcomings spoken of, or read about them in cold print, others can have no knowledge of them.
GEORG CHRISTOPH LICHTENBERG
The Reflections of Lichtenberg
Universal morality is to be found in little everyday penny-events just as much as in great ones.
GEORG CHRISTOPH LICHTENBERG
"Notebook B", Aphorisms
What is called an acute knowledge of human nature is mostly nothing but the observer's own weaknesses reflected back from others.
GEORG CHRISTOPH LICHTENBERG
"Notebook G", Aphorisms
Human pride is a strange thing; it cannot easily be suppressed, and if you stop up hole A will peep forth again in a twinkling from another hole B, and if this is closed it is ready to come out at hole C, and so on.
GEORG CHRISTOPH LICHTENBERG
The Reflections of Lichtenberg
The lowest classes, although they do not think it worth while to write down what they perceive, do nevertheless perceive and feel all that would have been worth the noting. The difference between the masses and the man of learning often consists in no more than a kind of apperception, or in the art of putting things into expression.
GEORG CHRISTOPH LICHTENBERG
The Reflections of Lichtenberg
A book is a mirror: if an ape looks into it an apostle is hardly likely to look out.
GEORG CHRISTOPH LICHTENBERG
"Notebook E", Aphorisms