344 Quotes by Georg Christoph Lichtenberg

I am grateful that I am not as judgmental as all those censorious, self-righteous people around me. In each of us there is a little of all of us.

People who have read a good deal rarely make great discoveries. I do not say this in excuse of laziness, but because invention presupposes an extensive independent contemplation of things.

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

Affectation is a very good word when someone does not wish to confess to what he would none the less like to believe of himself.

Non cogitant, ergo non sunt.

The lower classes of men, though they do not think it worthwhile to record what they perceive, nevertheless perceive everything that is worth noting; the difference between them and a man of learning often consists in nothing more than the latter’s facility for expression.

It is a sure evidence of a good book if it pleases us more and more as we grow older.

Is it not strange that men are so keen to fight for religion and so unkeen to live according to its precepts?

To make astute people believe one is what one is not is, in most cases, harder than actually to become what one wishes to appear.