Quotes from Georg C. Lichtenberg

A man has virtues enough if he deserves pardon for his faults on account of them.

Truly, men make too little use of their lives; and so it is no wonder that the world should still be in such a poor way.

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.

The Greeks possessed a knowledge of human nature we seem hardly able to attain to without passing through the strengthening hibernation of a new barbarism.

Here take back the stuff that I am, nature, knead it back into the dough of being, make of me a bush, a cloud, whatever you will, even a man, only no longer make me.

We cannot remember too often that when we observe nature, and especially the ordering of nature, it is always ourselves alone we are observing.

If this is philosophy it is at any rate a philosophy that is not in its right mind.

If an angel were to tell us about his philosophy, I believe many of his statements might well sound like '2 x 2= 13'.

It not seldom happens that in the purposeless rovings and wanderings of the imagination we hunt down such game as can be put to use by our purposeful philosophy in its well-ordered household.

Do not commence your exercises in philosophy in those regions where an error can deliver you over to the executioner.

God: personified incomprehensibility.

Perhaps pure reason without heart would never have thought of God.

After all, is our idea of God anything more than personified incomprehensibility?

Do not judge God's world from your own. Trim your own hedge as you wish and plant your flowers in the patterns you can understand, but do not judge the garden of nature from your little window box.

With God thoughts are colors, with us they are pigments-even the most abstract one may be accompanied by physical pain.

What is the good of drawing conclusions from experience? I don't deny we sometimes draw the right conclusions, but don't we just as often draw the wrong ones?

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

Affectation is a very good word when someone does not wish to confess to what he would none the less like to believe of himself.

It is a sure evidence of a good book if it pleases us more and more as we grow older.

The human tendency to regard little things as important has produced very many great things.

Universal morality is to be found in little everyday penny-events just as much as in great ones.

The worst thing you can possibly do is worrying and thinking about what you could have done.

If all mankind were suddenly to practice honesty, many thousands of people would be sure to starve.

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.