Quotes from Georg C. Lichtenberg

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

Food probably has a very great influence on the condition of men. Wine exercises a more visible influence, food does it more slowly but perhaps just as surely. Who knows if a well-prepared soup was not responsible for the pneumatic pump or a poor one for a war?

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

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

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

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?

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

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.

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.

One must judge men not by their opinions, but by what their opinions have made of them.

What makes our poetry so contemptible nowadays is its paucity of ideas. If you want to be read, invent. Who the Devil wouldn't like to read something new?

Courage, garrulousness and the mob are on our side. What more do we want?

He who understands the wise is wise already.

Love is blind, but marriage restores its sight.

Marriage, in contrast to the flu, starts with a fever and ends with the chills.

There exists a species of transcendental ventriloquism by means of which men can be made to believe that something said on earth comes from Heaven.

Man is a masterpiece of creation if for no other reason than that, all the weight of evidence for determinism notwithstanding, he believes he has free will.

Every man has his moral backside which he refrains from showing unless he has to and keeps covered as long as possible with the trousers of decorum.

Delight at having understood a very abstract and obscure system leads most people to believe in the truth of what it demonstrates.

He swallowed a lot of wisdom, but all of it seems to have gone down the wrong way.

Man is a masterpiece of creation . . .

Man is to be found in reason, God in the passions.

Men still have to be governed by deception.

It is strange that only extraordinary men make the discoveries, which later appear so easy and simple.