Georg Christoph Lichtenberg (1742 – 1799)
German scientist, satirist and philosopher.
A book is a mirror: if an ape looks into it an apostle is hardly likely to look out. We have no words for speaking of wisdom to the stupid. He who understands the wise is wise already.
The pleasures of the imagination are as it were only drawings and models which are played with by poor people who cannot afford the real thing.
I have written a good number of drafts and small reflections. They are not waiting for the last touch but for the sunlight to wake them up.
The most heated defenders of a science, who cannot endure the slightest sneer at it, are commonly those who have not made very much progress in it and are secretly aware of this defect.
With most men, unbelief in one thing springs from blind belief in another.
The most successful tempters and thus the most dangerous are the deluded deluders.
We can see nothing whatever of the soul unless it is visible in the expression of the countenance; one might call the faces at a large assembly of people a history of the human soul written in a kind of Chinese ideograms.
The American who first discovered Columbus made a bad discovery.
Lichtenberg digs deeper than anyone... but he does not come up again. Only he hears him who digs deep himself.
We are obliged to regard many of our original minds as crazy — at least until we have become as clever as they are.
Courage, garrulousness and the mob are on our side. What more do we want?
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.
We say that someone occupies an official position, whereas it is the official position that occupies him.
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.
People often become scholars for the same reason they become soldiers: simply because they are unfit for any other station. Their right hand has to earn them a livelihood; one might say they lie down like bears in winter and seek sustenance from their paws.
So-called professional mathematicians have, in their reliance on the relative incapacity of the rest of mankind, acquired for themselves a reputation for profundity very similar to the reputation for sanctity possessed by theologians.
Sickness is mankind's greatest defect.
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.
There are very many people who read simply to prevent themselves from thinking.
A book which, above all others in the world, should be forbidden, is a catalogue of forbidden books.