Quotes from Georg C. Lichtenberg

Virtue by premeditation isn't worth much.

Those who never have time do least

An hour-glass is a reminder not only of time's quick flight, but also of the dust to which we must at last return

I am convinced we do not only love ourselves in others but hate ourselves in others too.

To receive applause for works which do not demand all our powers hinders our advance towards a perfecting of our spirit. It usually means that thereafter we stand still.

Never trust a man who lays his hand on his heart when he assures you of anything.

One should never trust a person who, while assuring you of something, puts his hands on his heart.

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

Even truth needs to be clad in new garments if it is to appeal to a new age.

The most dangerous untruths are truths slightly distorted.

Propositions on which all men are in agreement are true: if they are not true we have no truth at all.

The fruits of philosophy are the important thing, not the philosophy itself. When we ask the time, we don't want to know how watches are made.

It is almost everywhere the case that soon after it is begotten the greater part of human wisdom is laid to rest in repositories.

If people should ever start to do only what is necessary millions would die of hunger.

The sure conviction that we could if we wanted to is the reason so many good minds are idle.

I believe that man is in the last resort so free a being that his right to be what he believes himself to be cannot be contested.

We often have need of a profound philosophy to restore to our feelings their original state of innocence, to find our way out of the rubble of things alien to us, to begin to feel for ourselves and to speak ourselves, and I might almost say to exist ourselves.

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

A handful of soldiers is always better than a mouthful of arguments.

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.

Many things about our bodies would not seem to us so filthy and obscene if we did not have the idea of nobility in our heads.

Cautiousness in judgment is nowadays to be recommended to each and every one: if we gained only one incontestable truth every ten years from each of our philosophical writers the harvest we reaped would be sufficient.

The most dangerous untruths are truths slightly distorted.

The most perfect ape cannot draw an ape; only man can do that; but, likewise, only man regards the ability to do this as a sign of superiority.