Quotes from Georg C. Lichtenberg

Nothing is more conducive to peace of mind than not having any opinion at all.

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

Be wary of passing the judgment: obscure. To find something obscure poses no difficult, elephants and poodles find many things obscure.

The proof that man is the noblest of all creatures is that no other creature has ever denied it.

In every man there is something of all men.

A clever child brought up with a foolish one can itself become foolish. Man is so perfectible and corruptible he can become a fool through good sense.

Great men too make mistakes, and many among them do it so often that one is almost tempted to call them little men.

A man always writes absolutely well whenever he writes in his own manner, but the wigmaker who tries to write like Gellert ... writes badly.

A man of spirit must not think of the word difficulty as so much as existing. Away with it!

I am always grieved when a man of real talent dies. The world needs such men more than Heaven does.

The world is a body common to all men, changes to it bring about a change in the souls of all men who are turned towards that part of it at that moment.

Most men of education are more superstitious than they admit - nay, than they think.

He who knows himself properly can very soon learn to know all other men. It is all reflection.

Nothing reveals a man's character better than the kind of joke at which he takes offense.

As soon as you know a man to be blind, you imagine that you can see it from his back.

The writer who cannot sometimes throw away a thought about which another man would have written dissertations, without worry whether or not the reader will find it, will never become a great writer.

The man was such an intellectual he was of almost no use.

There is something in the character of every man which cannot be broken in--the skeleton of his character; and to try to alter this is like training a sheep for draught purposes.

Is it so unjust that a man should leave the world by the same gate through which he entered it?

Man is perhaps half mind and half matter in the same way as the polyp is half plant and half animal. The strangest creatures are always found on the border lines of species.

Many a man who is willing to be shot for his belief in a miracle would have doubted, had he been present at the miracle itself.

A good part of the fame of most celebrated men is due to the shortsightedness of their admirers

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

God creates the animals, man creates himself.