Quotes from Georg Christoph Lichtenberg

If countries were named after the words you first hear when you go there, England would have to be called "Damn It".

Where the frontier of science once was is now the centre.

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.

Some people come by the name of genius in the same way that certain insects come by the name of centipede -- not because they have a hundred feet, but because most people can't count above 14.

A sure sign of a good book is that you like it more the older you get.

We accumulate our opinions at an age when our understanding is at its weakest.

To make a vow is a greater sin than to break one.

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

Is it not strange that men are so keen to fight for religion and so unkeen to live according to its precepts?

It is impossible to have bad taste, but many people have none at all.

After all, is our idea of God anything more than personified incomprehensibility? {Said in a letter to Voltaire }

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

There is something in our minds like sunshine and the weather, which is not under our control. When I write, the best things come to me from I know not where.

Much reading has brought upon us a learned barbarism

To make clever people believe we are what we are not is in most instances harder than really to become what we want to seem to be.

Just as there are polysyllabic words that say very little, so there are also monosyllabic words of infinite meaning.

Love is blind, but marriage restores its sight.

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.

In his Comedy , Dante Alighieri names Virgil, with many tokens of respect, as his teacher, and yet as Herr Meinhard remarks, makes such ill use of him: clear proof that even in the days of Dante one praised the ancients without knowing why. This respect for poets one does not understand and yet wishes to equal is the source of the bad writing in our literature.

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

Libraries can in general be too narrow or too wide for the soul.

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

Every condition of the soul has its own sign and expression...So you will see how hard it is to seem original without being so.

It makes a great difference by what path we come to a knowledge of certain things. If we begin in our youth with metaphysics and religion we can easily proceed along a series of rational conclusions that will lead us to the immortality of the soul. Not every other path will lead to this, at least not quite so easily.