Quotes by Georg Christoph Lichtenberg

A person reveals his character by nothing so clearly as the joke he resents.

With most people disbelief in a thing is founded on a blind belief in some other thing.

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

Everyone is a genius at least once a year. The real geniuses simply have their bright ideas closer together.

A book is a mirror: if an ape looks into it an apostle is hardly likely to look out.

Many are less fortunate than you’ may not be a roof to live under, but it will serve to retire beneath in the event of a shower.

Just as the performance of the vilest and most wicked deeds requires spirit and talent, so even the greatest demand a certain insensitivity which under other circumstances we would call stupidity.

God created man in His own image, says the Bible; philosophers reverse the process: they create God in theirs.

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

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

Much can be inferred about a man from his mistress: in her one beholds his weaknesses and his dreams.

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

We have no words for speaking of wisdom to the stupid. He who understands the wise is wise already.

Just as we outgrow a pair of trousers, we outgrow acquaintances, libraries, principles, etc., at times before they're worn out and times - and this is the worst of all - before we have new ones.

Sickness is mankind's greatest defect.

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.

The most dangerous untruths are truths slightly distorted.

There exists a species of transcendental ventriloquism by means of which men can be made to believe that something said on earth comes from Heaven.

One might call habit a moral friction: something that prevents the mind from gliding over things but connects it with them and makes it hard for it to free itself from them.

He who says he hates every kind of flattery, and says it in earnest, certainly does not yet know every kind of flattery.