339 Quotes by Georg C. Lichtenberg

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.

After all, is our idea of God anything more than personified incomprehensibility?

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.

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

Is it not strange that mankind should so willingly battle for religion and so unwillingly live according to its precepts?

To read means to borrow; to create out of one s readings is paying off one's debts.

People nowadays have such high hopes of America and the political conditions obtaining there that one might say the desires, at least the secret desires, of all enlightened Europeans are deflected to the west, like our magnetic needles.

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

Man is so perfectable and corruptible he can become a fool through good sense.