Georg Christoph Lichtenberg (1742 – 1799)
German scientist, satirist and philosopher.
Before one blames, one should always find out whether one cannot excuse. To discover little faults has been always the particularity of such brains that are a little or not at all above the average. The superior ones keep quiet or say something against the whole and the great minds transform without blaming.
Popular presentation today is all too often that which puts the mob in a position to talk about something without understanding it.
Reason now gazes above the realm of the dark but warm feelings as the Alpine peaks do above the clouds. They behold the sun more clearly and distinctly, but they are cold and unfruitful.
Man is to be found in reason, God in the passions.
Those who have racked their brains to discover new proofs have perhaps been induced to do so by a compulsion they could not quite explain to themselves. Instead of giving us their new proofs they should have explained to us the motivation that constrained them to search for them.
Cautiousness in judgment is nowadays to be recommended to each and every one: if we gained only one incontestable truth every ten years from each of our philosophical writers the harvest we reaped would be sufficient. ... To grow wiser means to learn to know better and better the faults to which this instrument with which we feel and judge can be subject.
One has to do something new in order to see something new.
Virtue by premeditation isn't worth much.
The greatest events occur without intention playing any part in them; chance makes good mistakes and undoes the most carefully planned undertaking. The world's greatest events are not produced, they happen.
You believe that I run after the strange because I do not know the beautiful; no, it is because you do not know the beautiful that I seek the strange.
The fly that doesn't want to be swatted is most secure when it lights on the fly-swatter.
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.
A good means to discovery is to take away certain parts of a system to find out how the rest behaves.
There is no greater impediment to progress in the sciences than the desire to see it take place too quickly.
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.
Nothing can contribute more to peace of soul than the lack of any opinion whatever.
If this is philosophy it is at any rate a philosophy that is not in its right mind.
Ideas too are a life and a world.
If it were true what in the end would be gained? Nothing but another truth. Is this such a mighty advantage? We have enough old truths still to digest, and even these we would be quite unable to endure if we did not sometimes flavor them with lies.
When a book and a head collide and a hollow sound is heard, must it always have come from the book?