Quotes from Georg C. Lichtenberg

Ask yourself always: how can this be done better?

Man can acquire accomplishments or he can become an animal, whichever he wants. God makes the animals, man makes himself.

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 me.

With a pen in my hand I have successfully stormed bulwarks from which others armed with sword and excommunication have been repulsed.

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

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

What is called an acute knowledge of human nature is mostly nothing but the observer's own weaknesses reflected back from others.

There are people who possess not so much genius as a certain talent for perceiving the desires of the century, or even of the decade, before it has done so itself.

Knowledge acquired too rapidly and without being personally supplemented is never very productive.

I made the journey to knowledge like dogs who go for walks with their masters, a hundred times forward and backward over the same territory; and when I arrived I was tired.

Cultivate that kind of knowledge which enables us to discover for ourselves in case of need that which others have to read or be told of.

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.

Actual aristocracy cannot be abolished by any law: all the law can do is decree how it is to be imparted and who is to acquire it.

The great rule: If the little bit you have is nothing special in itself, at least find a way of saying it that is a little bit special.

Astronomy is perhaps the science whose discoveries owe least to chance, in which human understanding appears in its whole magnitude, and through which man can best learn how small he is.

What we have to discover for ourselves leaves behind in our mind a pathway that can be used on another occasion.

Non cogitant, ergo non sunt.

Do not say hypothesis, and even less theory: say way of thinking.

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.

We say that someone occupies an official position, whereas it is the official position that occupies him.

There are very many people who read simply to prevent themselves from thinking.

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.

Erudition can produce foliage without bearing fruit.

The American who first discovered Columbus made a bad discovery.