A biography for Georg C. Lichtenberghasn’t been written yet.
“If you are going to build something in the air it is always better to build castles than houses of cards.”
“Sickness is mankind's greatest defect.”
“Perhaps in time the so-called Dark Ages will be thought of as including our own.”
“Here take back the stuff that I am, nature, knead it back into the dough of being, make of me a bush, a cloud, whatever you will, even a man, only no longer make me me.”
“If all else fails, the character of a man can be recognized by nothing so surely as by a jest which he takes badly.”
“There is no greater impediment to progress in the sciences than the desire to see it take place too quickly.”
“Erudition can produce foliage without bearing fruit.”
“I am convinced we do not only love ourselves in others but hate ourselves in others too.”
“What is called an acute knowledge of human nature is mostly nothing but the observer's own weaknesses reflected back from others.”
“It is a question whether, when we break a murderer on the wheel, we do not fall into the error a child makes when it hits the chair it has bumped into.”
“Just as we outgrow a pair of trousers, we outgrow acquaintances, libraries, principles, etc., at times before they're worn out and times - and this is the worst of all - before we have new ones.”
“A book is a mirror: if an ape looks into it an apostle is hardly likely to look out.”
“Men still have to be governed by deception.”
“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.”
“With a pen in my hand I have successfully stormed bulwarks from which others armed with sword and excommunication have been repulsed.”
“Much can be inferred about a man from his mistress: in her one beholds his weaknesses and his dreams.”
“When an acquaintance goes by I often step back from my window, not so much to spare him the effort of acknowledging me as to spare myself the embarrassment of seeing that he has not done so.”
“A handful of soldiers is always better than a mouthful of arguments.”
“I cannot say whether things will get better if we change; what I can say is they must change if they are to get better.”
“Be wary of passing the judgment: obscure. To find something obscure poses no difficult, elephants and poodles find many things obscure.”