Georg Christoph Lichtenberg

"With a pen in my hand I have successfully stormed bulwarks from which others armed with sword and excommunication have been repulsed."

"A on his lips and not-A in his heart."

"The great rule: 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."

"Good taste is either that which agrees with my taste or that which subjects itself to the rule of reason. From this we can see how useful it is to employ reason in seeking out the laws of taste."

"We do not think good metaphors are anything very important, but I think that a good metaphor is something even the police should keep an eye on..."

"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."

"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."

"Courage, garrulousness and the mob are on our side. What more do we want?"

"A handful of soldiers is always better than a mouthful of arguments."

"Do we write books so that they shall merely be read? Don't we also write them for employment in the household? For one that is read from start to finish, thousands are leafed through, other thousands lie motionless, others are jammed against mouseholes, thrown at rats, others are stood on, sat on, drummed on, have gingerbread baked on them or are used to light pipes."

"To do the opposite of something is also a form of imitation, namely an imitation of its opposite."

"As I take up my pen I feel myself so full, so equal to my subject, and see my book so clearly before me in embryo, I would almost like to try to say it all in a single word."

"Nothing can contribute more to peace of soul than the lack of any opinion whatever."

"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."

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

"Be wary of passing the judgment: obscure. To find something obscure poses no difficulty: elephants and poodles find many things obscure."

"We are obliged to regard many of our original minds as crazy — at least until we have become as clever as they are."

"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..."

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

"Body and soul: a horse harnessed beside an ox."

"There are people who believe everything is sane and sensible that is done with a solemn face. … It is no great art to say something briefly when, like Tacitus, one has something to say; when one has nothing to say, however, and none the less writes a whole book and makes truth … into a liar — that I call an achievement."

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

"When a book and a head collide and a hollow sound is heard, must it always have come from the book?"

"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."

"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?"

"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."

"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 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."

"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."

"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."

"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."

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

"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."

"Cultivate that kind of knowledge which enables us to discover for ourselves in case of need that which others have to read or be told of."

"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."

"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."

"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."

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

"Erudition can produce foliage without bearing fruit."

"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."

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

"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?"

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

"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."

"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."

"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."

"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."

"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."

"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."

"If it is permissible to write plays that are not intended to be seen, I should like to see who can prevent me from writing a book no one can read."