A handful of soldiers is always better than a mouthful of arguments.
- Georg C. Lichtenberg Quote
Actual aristocracy cannot be abolished by any law: all the law can do is decree how it is to be imparted and who is to acquire it.
- Georg C. Lichtenberg Quote
Be wary of passing the judgment: obscure. To find something obscure poses no difficult, elephants and poodles find many things obscure.
- Georg C. Lichtenberg Quote
Delight at having understood a very abstract and obscure system leads most people to believe in the truth of what it demonstrates.
- Georg C. Lichtenberg Quote
Erudition can produce foliage without bearing fruit.
- Georg C. Lichtenberg Quote
Even truth needs to be clad in new garments if it is to appeal to a new age.
- Georg C. Lichtenberg Quote
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.
- Georg C. Lichtenberg Quote
Everyone is a genius at least once a year. The real geniuses simply have their bright ideas closer together.
- Georg C. Lichtenberg Quote
God created man in His own image, says the Bible; philosophers reverse the process: they create God in theirs.
- Georg C. Lichtenberg Quote
He who is enamored of himself will at least have the advantage of being inconvenienced by few rivals.
- Georg C. Lichtenberg Quote
He who says he hates every kind of flattery, and says it in earnest, certainly does not yet know every kind of flattery.
- Georg C. Lichtenberg Quote
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.
- Georg C. Lichtenberg Quote
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.
- Georg C. Lichtenberg Quote
If all else fails, the character of a man can be recognized by nothing so surely as by a jest which he takes badly.
- Georg C. Lichtenberg Quote
If the little bit you have is nothing special in itself, at least find a way of saying it that is a little bit special.
- Georg C. Lichtenberg Quote
If you are going to build something in the air it is always better to build castles than houses of cards.
- Georg C. Lichtenberg Quote
It is almost everywhere the case that soon after it is begotten the greater part of human wisdom is laid to rest in repositories.
- Georg C. Lichtenberg Quote
It is in the gift for employing all the vicissitudes of life to one's own advantage and to that of one's craft that a large part of genius consists.
- Georg C. Lichtenberg Quote
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.
- Georg C. Lichtenberg Quote
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.
- Georg C. Lichtenberg Quote
Man is to be found in reason, God in the passions.
- Georg C. Lichtenberg Quote
Man loves company, even if it is only that of a smouldering candle.
- Georg C. Lichtenberg Quote
Men still have to be governed by deception.
- Georg C. Lichtenberg Quote
Much can be inferred about a man from his mistress: in her one beholds his weaknesses and his dreams.
- Georg C. Lichtenberg Quote
Nothing can contribute more to peace of soul than the lack of any opinion whatever.
- Georg C. Lichtenberg Quote
Nothing is more conducive to peace of mind than not having any opinion at all.
- Georg C. Lichtenberg Quote
Once we know our weaknesses they cease to do us any harm.
- Georg C. Lichtenberg Quote
One might call habit a moral friction: something that prevents the mind from gliding over things but connects it with them and makes it hard for it to free itself from them.
- Georg C. Lichtenberg Quote
One must judge men not by their opinions, but by what their opinions have made of them.
- Georg C. Lichtenberg Quote
Perhaps in time the so-called Dark Ages will be thought of as including our own.
- Georg C. Lichtenberg Quote
Sickness is mankind's greatest defect.
- Georg C. Lichtenberg Quote
That man is the noblest creature may also be inferred from the fact that no other creature has yet contested this claim.
- Georg C. Lichtenberg Quote
The American who first discovered Columbus made a bad discovery.
- Georg C. Lichtenberg Quote
The fly that doesn't want to be swatted is most secure when it lights on the fly-swatter.
- Georg C. Lichtenberg Quote
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.
- Georg C. Lichtenberg Quote
The most dangerous untruths are truths slightly distorted.
- Georg C. Lichtenberg Quote
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.
- Georg C. Lichtenberg Quote
The noble simplicity in the works of nature only too often originates in the noble shortsightedness of him who observes it.
- Georg C. Lichtenberg Quote
There are people who possess not so much genius as a certain talent for perceiving the desires of the century, or even of the decade, before it has done so itself.
- Georg C. Lichtenberg Quote
There are very many people who read simply to prevent themselves from thinking.
- Georg C. Lichtenberg Quote
To be content with life or to live merrily, rather all that is required is that we bestow on all things only a fleeting, superficial glance; the more thoughtful we become the more earnest we grow.
- Georg C. Lichtenberg Quote
To do the opposite of something is also a form of imitation, namely an imitation of its opposite.
- Georg C. Lichtenberg Quote
To err is human also in so far as animals seldom or never err, or at least only the cleverest of them do so.
- Georg C. Lichtenberg Quote
We accumulate our opinions at an age when our understanding is at its weakest.
- Georg C. Lichtenberg Quote
We are obliged to regard many of our original minds as crazy at least until we have become as clever as they are.
- Georg C. Lichtenberg Quote
We cannot remember too often that when we observe nature, and especially the ordering of nature, it is always ourselves alone we are observing.
- Georg C. Lichtenberg Quote
We have no words for speaking of wisdom to the stupid. He who understands the wise is wise already.
- Georg C. Lichtenberg Quote
We say that someone occupies an official position, whereas it is the official position that occupies him.
- Georg C. Lichtenberg Quote
What is called an acute knowledge of human nature is mostly nothing but the observer's own weaknesses reflected back from others.
- Georg C. Lichtenberg Quote
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?
- Georg C. Lichtenberg Quote
When an acquaintance goes by I often step back from my window, not so much to spare him the effort of acknowledging me as to spare myself the embarrassment of seeing that he has not done so.
- Georg C. Lichtenberg Quote
With a pen in my hand I have successfully stormed bulwarks from which others armed with sword and excommunication have been repulsed.
- Georg C. Lichtenberg Quote
With most people disbelief in a thing is founded on a blind belief in some other thing.
- Georg C. Lichtenberg Quote
With prophecies the commentator is often a more important man than the prophet.
- Georg C. Lichtenberg Quote
