143 quotes
The most heated defenders of a science, who cannot endure the slightest sneer at it, are commonly those who have not made very much progress in it and are secretly aware of this defect.
Aphorisms (1765)
Just as the performance of the vilest and most wicked deeds requires spirit and talent, so even the greatest demand a certain insensitivity which under other circumstances we would call stupidity.
Aphorisms (1765)
As the few adepts in such things well know, universal morality is to be found in little everyday penny-events just as much as in great ones. There is so much goodness and ingenuity in a raindrop that an apothecary wouldn't let it go for less than half-a-crown.
Aphorisms (1765)
Courage, garrulousness and the mob are on our side. What more do we want?
Aphorisms (1765)
Cultivate that kind of knowledge which enables us to discover for ourselves in case of need that which others have to read or be told of.
Aphorisms (1765)
To receive applause for works which do not demand all our powers hinders our advance towards a perfecting of our spirit. It usually means that thereafter we stand still.
Aphorisms (1765)
The American who first discovered Columbus made a bad discovery.
Aphorisms (1765)
We do not think good metaphors are anything very important, but I think that a good metaphor is something even the police should keep an eye on...
Aphorisms (1765)
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.
Aphorisms (1765)
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.
Aphorisms (1765)
There is no more important rule of conduct in the world than this: attach yourself as much as you can to people who are abler than you and yet not so very different that you cannot understand them.
Aphorisms (1765)
The greatest events occur without intention playing any part in them; chance makes good mistakes and undoes the most carefully planned undertaking. The world's greatest events are not produced, they happen.
Aphorisms (1765)
The common individual always conforms to the prevailing opinion and the prevailing fashion; he regards the state in which everything now exists as the only possible one and passively accepts it all. … To the genius it always occurs to ask: Could this too not be false?
Many things about our bodies would not seem to us so filthy and obscene if we did not have the idea of nobility in our heads.
Aphorisms (1765)
If it is permissible to write plays that are not intended to be seen, I should like to see who can prevent me from writing a book no one can read.
Aphorisms (1765)
You believe that I run after the strange because I do not know the beautiful; no, it is because you do not know the beautiful that I seek the strange.
Aphorisms (1765)
Sickness is mankind's greatest defect.
Aphorisms (1765)
All mathematical laws which we find in Nature are always suspect to me, in spite of their beauty. They give me no pleasure. They are merely auxiliaries. At close range it is all not true.
Lichtenberg : A Doctrine of Scattered Occasions (1959)
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.
Aphorisms (1765)
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.
Aphorisms (1765)