"What makes our poetry so contemptible nowadays is its paucity of ideas. If you want to be read, invent. Who the Devil wouldn't like to read something new?"

"That man is the noblest creature may also be inferred from the fact that no other creature has yet contested this claim."

"Nowadays three witty turns of phrase and a lie make a writer."

"The journalists have constructed for themselves a little wooden chapel, which they also call the Temple of Fame, in which they put up and take down portraits all day long and make such a hammering you can't hear yourself speak."

"Many things about our bodies would not seem to us so filthy and obscene if we did not have the idea of nobility in our heads."

"Once we know our weaknesses they cease to do us any harm."

"If people should ever start to do only what is necessary millions would die of hunger."

"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."

"Once the good man was dead, one wore his hat and another his sword as he had worn them, a third had himself barbered as he had, a fourth walked as he did, but the honest man that he was — nobody any longer wanted to be that."

"Even truth needs to be clad in new garments if it is to appeal to a new age."

"Erudition can produce foliage without bearing fruit."

"Astronomy is perhaps the science whose discoveries owe least to chance, in which human understanding appears in its whole magnitude, and through which man can best learn how small he is."

"Do not commence your exercises in philosophy in those regions where an error can deliver you over to the executioner."

"What concerns me alone I only think, what concerns my friends I tell them, what can be of interest to only a limited public I write, and what the world ought to know is printed..."

"We often have need of a profound philosophy to restore to our feelings their original state of innocence, to find our way out of the rubble of things alien to us, to begin to feel for ourselves and to speak ourselves, and I might almost say to exist ourselves. Even if my philosophy does not extend to discovering anything new, it does nevertheless possess the courage to regard as questionable what has long been thought true."

"If an angel were ever to tell us anything of his philosophy I believe many propositions would sound like 2 times 2 equals 13."

"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."

"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."

"As the few adepts in such things well know, universal morality is to be found in little everyday penny-events just as much as in great ones. There is so much goodness and ingenuity in a raindrop that an apothecary wouldn't let it go for less than half-a-crown."

"He was then in his fifty-fourth year, when even in the case of poets reason and passion begin to discuss a peace treaty and usually conclude it not very long afterwards."

"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."

"There are two ways of extending life: firstly by moving the two points "born" and "died" farther away from one another... The other method is to go more slowly and leave the two points wherever God wills they should be, and this method is for the philosophers."

"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."

"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."

"Prejudices are so to speak the mechanical instincts of men: through their prejudices they do without any effort many things they would find too difficult to think through to the point of resolving to do 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."

"It is we who are the measure of what is strange and miraculous: if we sought a universal measure the strange and miraculous would not occur and all things would be equal."

"Food probably has a very great influence on the condition of men. Wine exercises a more visible influence, food does it more slowly but perhaps just as surely. Who knows if a well-prepared soup was not responsible for the pneumatic pump or a poor one for a war?"

"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."

"Man is to be found in reason, God in the passions."

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

"One has to do something new in order to see something new."

"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."

"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."

"If all else fails, the character of a man can be recognized by nothing so surely as by a jest which he takes badly."

"To receive applause for works which do not demand all our powers hinders our advance towards a perfecting of our spirit. It usually means that thereafter we stand still."

"He who says he hates every kind of flattery, and says it in earnest, certainly does not yet know every kind of flattery."

"Man loves company — even if it is only that of a small burning candle."

"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."

"It is almost everywhere the case that soon after it is begotten the greater part of human wisdom is laid to rest in repositories."

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

"Lichtenberg digs deeper than anyone... but he does not come up again. Only he hears him who digs deep himself."

"He is not a household name. He is something rarer: a name savored by household names. Goethe, who corresponded with Lichtenberg, admired him greatly (even though Lichtenberg disputed his theory of color)."

"God created man in His own image, and in requital man created God in his, says Lichtenberg, and it is true that a man’s conception of God is essentially determined by the kind of man he is. So it is that I conceive of God as one who approves in a calculated vigilance, I believe that he approves of intrigues, and what I have read in the sacred books of the Old Testament is not of a sort to dishearten me. The Old Testament furnishes examples abundantly of a shrewdness which is nevertheless well pleasing to God, and that at a later period Christ said to His disciples, “These things I said not unto you from the beginning … I have yet many things to say unto you, but ye cannot bear them now” – so here is a teleological suspension of the ethical rule of telling the whole truth."

"We may use Lichtenberg’s writings as the most wonderful dowsing rod: wherever he makes a joke, there a problem lies hidden."

"Perhaps he was even more remarkable as a psychologist than as a physicist."

"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."

"Bei den meisten Menschen gründet sich der unglaube in einer Sache auf blinden Glauben in einer anderen."

"He was always smoothing and polishing himself, and in the end he became blunt before he was sharp."

"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."