Quotes from Georg C. Lichtenberg

Man is a masterpiece of creation, if only because no amount of determinism can prevent him from believing that he acts as a free being.

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.

Man is so perfectable and corruptible he can become a fool through good sense.

Of all the inventions of man I doubt whether any was more easily accomplished than that of a Heaven.

Man is always partial and is quite right to be. Even impartiality is partial.

A man is never more serious than when he praise himself.

That man is the noblest creature may also be inferred from the fact that no other creature has yet contested this claim.

With prophecies the commentator is often a more important man than the prophet.

If all else fails, the character of a man can be recognized by nothing so surely as by a jest which he takes badly.

The highest point to which a weak but experienced mind can rise is detecting the weakness of better men.

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.

Nowadays beautiful women are counted among the talents of their husbands.

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.

We are obliged to regard many of our original minds as crazy at least until we have become as clever as they are.

Nothing can contribute more to peace of soul than the lack of any opinion whatever.

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

Man loves company - even if it is only that of a small burning candle.

What concerns me alone I only think, what concerns my friends I tell them, what can be of interest to only a limited public I write, and what the world ought to know is printed.

To do the opposite of something is also a form of imitation, namely an imitation of its opposite.

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

One of the greatest creations of the human mind is the art of reviewing books without having read them.

As I take up my pen I feel myself so full, so equal to my subject, and see my book so clearly before me in embryo, I would almost like to try to say it all in a single word.

The celebrated painter Gainsborough got as much pleasure from seeing violins as from hearing them.

All mathematical laws which we find in Nature are always suspect to me, in spite of their beauty. They give me no pleasure. They are merely auxiliaries. At close range it is all not true.