339 Quotes by Georg C. Lichtenberg

If brandy was made out of sparrows there would soon be no sparrows.

Universal morality is to be found in little everyday penny-events just as much as in great ones.

Great men too make mistakes, and many among them do it so often that one is almost tempted to call them little men.

It is certainly not a matter of indifference whether I learn something without effort or finally arrive at it myself through my system of thought. In the latter case everything has roots, in the former it is merely superficial.

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.

God, who winds up our sundials ...

One of the greatest and also the commonest of faults is for men to believe that, because they never hear their shortcomings spoken of, or read about them in cold print, others can have no knowledge of them.

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.

The American who first discovered Columbus made a bad discovery.