Georg C Lichtenberg

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.

Every man 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.

Reading means borrowing.

One must judge men not by their opinions, but by what their opinions have made of them.

Men still have to be governed by deception.

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

If you are going to build something in the air it is always better to build castles than houses of cards.

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.

Man loves company — even if it is only that of a small burning candle.

A sure sign of a good book is that you like it more the older you get.

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

Prejudices are so to speak the mechanical instincts of men: through their prejudices they do without any effort many things they would find too difficult to think through to the point of resolving to do them.

One of our forefathers must have read a forbidden book.

To receive applause for works which do not demand all our powers hinders our advance towards a perfecting of our spirit. It usually means that thereafter we stand still.

To do just the opposite is also a form of imitation.

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.

Libraries can in general be too narrow or too wide for the soul.

Man is a masterpiece of creation if for no other reason than that, all the weight of evidence for determinism notwithstanding, he believes he has free will.

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

First we have to believe, and then we believe.