Quotes from Georg Christoph Lichtenberg

It often takes more courage to change one's opinion than to stick to it.

What I do not like about our definitions of genius is that there is in them nothing of the day of judgment, nothing of resounding through eternity and nothing of the footsteps of the Almighty.

If we thought more for ourselves we would have very many more bad books and very many more good ones.

I am confident of my ability to demonstrate that one can sometimes believe in something and yet not believe in it. Nothing is less fathomable than the systems that motivate our actions.

Man…who lives in three places – in the past, in the present, and in the future – can be unhappy if one of these three is worthless. Religion has even added a fourth – eternity.

When they have discovered truth in nature they fling it into a book, where it is even worse hands.

...if we gained only one incontestable truth every ten years from each of our philosophical writers the harvest we reaped would be sufficient.

A book is a mirror: if an ape looks into it an apostle is unlikely to look out.

Soothsayers make a better living in the world than truthsayers.

There are people who think that everything one does with a serious face is sensible.

Nothing contributes more to peace of soul than having no opinion at all.

A writer who wishes to be read by posterity must not be averse to putting hints which might give rise to whole books, or ideas for learned discussions, in some corner of a chapter so that one should think he can afford to throw them away by the thousand.

I am convinced that a person doesn't only love himself in others; he also hates himself in others.

I am always grieved when a man of real talent dies. The world needs such men more than Heaven does.

Nowadays we already have books about books and descriptions of descriptions.

I would often rather read what a famous author has cut from one of his works than what he has let stand.

First there is a time when we believe everything, then for a little while we believe with discrimination, then we believe nothing whatever, and then we believe everything again - and, moreover, give reasons why we believe.

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.

Man is a gregarious animal and much more so in his mind than in his body. A golden rule; 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 smoldering candle.

One cannot demand of a scholar that he show himself a scholar everywhere in society, but the whole tenor of his behavior must none the less betray the thinker, he must always be instructive, his way of judging a thing must even in the smallest matters be such that people can see what it will amount to when, quietly and self-collected, he puts this power to scholarly use.

The proof that man is the noblest of all creatures is that no other creature has ever denied it.

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

When a book and a head collide and there is a hollow sound, is it always from the book?