344 Quotes by Georg Christoph Lichtenberg

Bad writers are those who try to express their own feeble ideas in the language of good ones.

A schoolteacher or professor cannot educate individuals, he educates only species.

With God thoughts are colors, with us they are pigments-even the most abstract one may be accompanied by physical pain.

The highest point to which a weak but experienced mind can rise is detecting the weakness of better men.

There are people who think that everything one does with a serious face is sensible.

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.

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

Wouldn’t things look much better for the human race if we no longer had history, at least no political history? The human being then would act more in accordance with the energies he possesses at any given time; for as things stand today, the example that now and then makes one person better makes a thousand others worse.

If there were only turnips and potatoes in the world, someone would complain that plants grow the wrong way.