Georg Christoph Lichtenberg

“No es que los oráculos hayan dejado de hablar, sino que los hombres han dejado de escucharlos.”

“Има хора, които си въобразяват, че всичко, което се прави със сериозен вид, е разумно.”

“Wenn ein Buch und ein Kopf zusammenstoßen und es klingt hohl, ist das allemal im Buch?”

“There is no mistaking a good book when one meets it. It is like falling in love.”

“Don't judge a man by his opinions, but what his opinions have made of him.”

“Perhaps in time the so-called Dark Ages will be thought of as including our own.”

“To make a vow is a greater sin than to break one.”

“Honest unaffected distrust of human abilities under all circumstances is the surest sign of strength of mind.”

“To make clever people believe we are what we are not is in most instances harder than really to become what we want to seem to be.”

“The most dangerous of all falsehoods is a slightly distorted truth.”

“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.”

“It is impossible to have bad taste, but many people have none at all.”

“If we thought more for ourselves we would have very many more bad books and very many more good ones.”

“Diogenes, filthily attired, paced across the splendid carpets in Plato's dwelling. Thus, said he, do I trample on the pride of Plato. Yes, Plato replied, but only with another kind of pride.”

“...if we gained only one incontestable truth every ten years from each of our philosophical writers the harvest we reaped would be sufficient.”

“The excuses we make to ourselves when we want to do something are excellent material for soliloquies, for they are rarely made except when we are alone, and are very often made aloud.”

“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.”

“Când ai de facut o lucrare, nu te gândi mereu la întregimea ei; executa fragmentul pe care-l ai în fata, si când ai terminat cu el, mergi mai departe”

“Ein Buch ist ein Spiegel wenn ein Affe hineinsieht so kann kein Apostel heraus gucken.”

“Kenntnis der Mittel ohne eine eigentliche Anwendung, ja ohne Gabe und Willen, sie anzuwenden, ist, was man jetzt gemeiniglich Gelehrsamkeit nennt.”

“Just as there are polysyllabic words that say very little, so there are also monosyllabic words of infinite meaning.”

“You believe 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.”

“You can make a good living from soothsaying but not from truthsaying”

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

“Nothing is more conductive to peace of mind than not having any opinions at all.”

“Whenever he composes a critical review, I have been told, he gets an enormous erection.”

“One's first step in wisdom is to question everything - and one's last is to come to terms with everything.”

“Some people come by the name of genius in the same way that certain insects come by the name of centipede -- not because they have a hundred feet, but because most people can't count above 14.”

“A sure sign of a good book is that you like it more the older you get.”

“Much reading has brought upon us a learned barbarism”

“A book is a mirror; if an ass peers into it, you can't expect an apostle to peer out.”

“If countries were named after the words you first hear when you go there, England would have to be called "Damn It".”

“The thoughts written on the walls of madhouses by their inmates might be worth publicizing.”

“I would give something to know for precisely whom the deeds were really done, of which it is publicly stated they were done 'for the Fatherland'.”

“Many are less fortunate than you’ may not be a roof to live under, but it will serve to retire beneath in the event of a shower.”

“The man was such an intellectual he was of almost no use.”

“Libraries can in general be too narrow or too wide for the soul.”

“Man…who lives in three places – in the past, in the present, and in the future – can be unhappy if one of these three is worthless. Religion has even added a fourth – eternity.”

“The highest level than can be reached by a mediocre but experienced mind is a talent for uncovering the weaknesses of those greater than itself.”

“I am confident of my ability to demonstrate that one can sometimes believe in something and yet not believe in it. Nothing is less fathomable than the systems that motivate our actions.”

“Every condition of the soul has its own sign and expression...So you will see how hard it is to seem original without being so.”

“A person reveals his character by nothing so clearly as the joke he resents.”

“To do just the opposite is also a form of imitation.”

“There is something in our minds like sunshine and the weather, which is not under our control. When I write, the best things come to me from I know not where.”

“In his Comedy, Dante Alighieri names Virgil, with many tokens of respect, as his teacher, and yet as Herr Meinhard remarks, makes such ill use of him: clear proof that even in the days of Dante one praised the ancients without knowing why. This respect for poets one does not understand and yet wishes to equal is the source of the bad writing in our literature.”

“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.”

“With most men, unbelief in one thing springs from blind belief in another.”

“It is almost impossible to carry the torch of truth through a crowd without singeing somebody's beard.”

“There are very many people who read simply to prevent themselves from thinking.”

“Everyone is a genius at least once a year. The real geniuses simply have their bright ideas closer together.”