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Company, Companions
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Man loves company, even if it is only that of a smoldering candle.
-G. C. (Georg Christoph) Lichtenberg
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Contentment
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To be content with life -- or to live merrily, rather --all that is required is that we bestow on all things only a fleeting, superficial glance; the more thoughtful we become the more earnest we grow.
-G. C. (Georg Christoph) Lichtenberg
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Cynicism
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It is said that truth comes from the mouths of fools and children: I wish every good mind which feels an inclination for satire would reflect that the finest satirist always has something of both in him.
-G. C. (Georg Christoph) Lichtenberg
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Deception/Lying
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If all mankind were suddenly to practice honesty, many thousands of people would be sure to starve.
-G. C. (Georg Christoph) Lichtenberg
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Discovery
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If we make a couple of discoveries here and there we need not believe things will go on like this for ever. Just as we hit water when we dig in the earth, so we discover the incomprehensible sooner or later.
-G. C. (Georg Christoph) Lichtenberg
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The American who first discovered Columbus made a bad discovery.
-G. C. (Georg Christoph) Lichtenberg
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Doubt
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Cautiousness in judgment is nowadays to be recommended to each and every one: if we gained only one incontestable truth every ten years from each of our philosophical writers the harvest we reaped would be sufficient.
-G. C. (Georg Christoph) Lichtenberg
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Evangelism
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It is hardly to be believed how spiritual reflections when mixed with a little physics can hold people's attention and give them a livelier idea of God than do the often ill-applied examples of his wrath.
-G. C. (Georg Christoph) Lichtenberg
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Experience
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What is the good of drawing conclusions from experience? I don't deny we sometimes draw the right conclusions, but don't we just as often draw the wrong ones?
-G. C. (Georg Christoph) Lichtenberg
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Face, Faces
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We can see nothing whatever of the soul unless it is visible in the expression of the countenance; one might call the faces at a large assembly of people a history of the human soul written in a kind of Chinese ideograms.
-G. C. (Georg Christoph) Lichtenberg
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Fantasy
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The pleasures of the imagination are as it were only drawings and models which are played with by poor people who cannot afford the real thing.
-G. C. (Georg Christoph) Lichtenberg
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Fashion
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Even truth needs to be clad in new garments if it is to appeal to a new age.
-G. C. (Georg Christoph) Lichtenberg
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Fate & Destiny
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He who is in love with himself has at least this advantage -- he won't encounter many rivals.
-G. C. (Georg Christoph) Lichtenberg
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Flattery
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He who says he hates every kind of flattery, and says it in earnest, certainly does not yet know every kind of flattery.
-G. C. (Georg Christoph) Lichtenberg
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Food
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If there were only turnips and potatoes in the world, someone would complain that plants grow the wrong way.
-G. C. (Georg Christoph) Lichtenberg
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Food probably has a very great influence on the condition of men. Wine exercises a more visible influence, food does it more slowly but perhaps just as surely. Who knows if a well-prepared soup was not responsible for the pneumatic pump or a poor one for a war?
-G. C. (Georg Christoph) Lichtenberg
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Fools, Foolishness
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A clever child brought up with a foolish one can itself become foolish. Man is so perfectible and corruptible he can become a fool through good sense.
-G. C. (Georg Christoph) Lichtenberg
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Freedom
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Man is a masterpiece of creation if for no other reason than that, all the weight of evidence for determinism notwithstanding, he believes he has free will.
-G. C. (Georg Christoph) Lichtenberg
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What most clearly characterizes true freedom and its true employment is its misemployment.
-G. C. (Georg Christoph) Lichtenberg
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Genius
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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.
-G. C. (Georg Christoph) Lichtenberg
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Everyone is a genius at least once a year; a real genius has his original ideas closer together.
-G. C. (Georg Christoph) Lichtenberg
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Greatness & Great Things
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There are people who possess not so much genius as a certain talent for perceiving the desires of the century, or even of the decade, before it has done so itself.
-G. C. (Georg Christoph) Lichtenberg
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Habits
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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.
-G. C. (Georg Christoph) Lichtenberg
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Heaven
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Of all the inventions of man I doubt whether any was more easily accomplished than that of a Heaven.
-G. C. (Georg Christoph) Lichtenberg
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Humanity
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What is called an acute knowledge of human nature is mostly nothing but the observer's own weaknesses reflected back from others.
-G. C. (Georg Christoph) Lichtenberg
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Books by and about G. C. (Georg Christoph) Lichtenberg