A book is a mirror: if an ape looks into it an apostle is hardly likely to look out.
Georg C. Lichtenberg

A handful of soldiers is always better than a mouthful of arguments.
Georg C. Lichtenberg

A person reveals his character by nothing so clearly as the joke he resents.
Georg C. Lichtenberg

Actual aristocracy cannot be abolished by any law: all the law can do is decree how it is to be imparted and who is to acquire it.
Georg C. Lichtenberg

Be wary of passing the judgment: obscure. To find something obscure poses no difficult, elephants and poodles find many things obscure.
Georg C. Lichtenberg

Delight at having understood a very abstract and obscure system leads most people to believe in the truth of what it demonstrates.
Georg C. Lichtenberg

Doubt must be no more than vigilance, otherwise it can become dangerous.
Georg C. Lichtenberg

Erudition can produce foliage without bearing fruit.
Georg C. Lichtenberg

Even truth needs to be clad in new garments if it is to appeal to a new age.
Georg C. Lichtenberg

Every man has his moral backside which he refrains from showing unless he has to and keeps covered as long as possible with the trousers of decorum.
Georg C. Lichtenberg

Everyone is a genius at least once a year. The real geniuses simply have their bright ideas closer together.
Georg C. Lichtenberg

God created man in His own image, says the Bible; philosophers reverse the process: they create God in theirs.
Georg C. Lichtenberg

He who is in love with himself has at least this advantage - he won't encounter many rivals.
Georg C. Lichtenberg

He who says he hates every kind of flattery, and says it in earnest, certainly does not yet know every kind of flattery.
Georg C. Lichtenberg

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.
Georg C. Lichtenberg

I am convinced we do not only love ourselves in others but hate ourselves in others too.
Georg C. Lichtenberg

I believe that man is in the last resort so free a being that his right to be what he believes himself to be cannot be contested.
Georg C. Lichtenberg

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.
Georg C. Lichtenberg

If all else fails, the character of a man can be recognized by nothing so surely as by a jest which he takes badly.
Georg C. Lichtenberg

If people should ever start to do only what is necessary millions would die of hunger.
Georg C. Lichtenberg