Quotes from Georg C. Lichtenberg

What a blessing it would be if we could open and shut our ears...as easily as we open and shut our eyes.

To be content with life or to live merrily, rather all that is required is that we bestow on all things only a fleeting, superficial glance; the more thoughtful we become the more earnest we grow.

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.

Delicacy in woman is strength.

One's first step in wisdom is to question everything - and one's last is to come to terms with everything.

He who is enamored of himself will at least have the advantage of being inconvenienced by few rivals.

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

When an acquaintance goes by I often step back from my window, not so much to spare him the effort of acknowledging me as to spare myself the embarrassment of seeing that he has not done so.

A schoolteacher or professor cannot educate individuals, he educates only species.

Nothing makes one old so quickly as the ever-present thought that one is growing older.

There is no greater impediment to progress in the sciences than the desire to see it take place too quickly.

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

To grow wiser means to learn to know better and better the faults to which this instrument with which we feel and judge can be subject.

Nowadays three witty turns of phrase and a lie make a writer.

He was then in his fifty-fourth year, when even in the case of poets reason and passion begin to discuss a peace treaty and usually conclude it not very long afterwards.

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.

People who never have any time on their hands are those who do the least.

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.

Perhaps in time the so-called Dark Ages will be thought of as including our own.

Ideas too are a life and a world.

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

The noble simplicity in the works of nature only too often originates in the noble shortsightedness of him who observes it.

To err is human also in so far as animals seldom or never err, or at least only the cleverest of them do so.

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