Georg C. Lichtenberg

• "We accumulate our opinions at an age when our understanding is at its weakest.“
• "Even truth needs to be clad in new garments if it is to appeal to a new age.“
• "We cannot remember too often that when we observe nature, and especially the ordering of nature, it is always ourselves alone we are observing.“
• "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.“
• "Never undertake anything for which you wouldn't have the courage to ask the blessings of heaven.“
• "Much can be inferred about a man from his mistress: in her one beholds his weaknesses and his dreams.“
• "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?“
• "God created man in His own image, says the Bible philosophers reverse the process: they create God in theirs.“
• "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.“
• "Everyone is a genius at least once a year. The real geniuses simply have their bright ideas closer together.“
• "What is called an acute knowledge of human nature is mostly nothing but the observer's own weaknesses reflected back from others.“
• "The Greeks possessed a knowledge of human nature we seem hardly able to attain to without passing through the strengthening hibernation of a new barbarism.“
• "One must judge men not by their opinions, but by what their opinions have made of them.“
• "Prejudices are so to speak the mechanical instincts of men: through their prejudices they do without any effort many things they would find too difficult to think through to the point of resolving to do them.“
• "We cannot remember too often that when we observe nature, and especially the ordering of nature, it is always ourselves alone we are observing.“
• "What is called an acute knowledge of human nature is mostly nothing but the observer's own weaknesses reflected back from others.“
• "The Greeks possessed a knowledge of human nature we seem hardly able to attain to without passing through the strengthening hibernation of a new barbarism.“
• "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.“
• "The noble simplicity in the works of nature only too often originates in the noble shortsightedness of him who observes it.“
• "Nothing is more conducive to peace of mind than not having any opinion at all.“
• "Nothing can contribute more to peace of soul than the lack of any opinion whatever.“
• "Perhaps in time the so-called Dark Ages will be thought of as including our own.“
• "We have no words for speaking of wisdom to the stupid. He who understands the wise is wise already.“
• "It is almost everywhere the case that soon after it is begotten the greater part of human wisdom is laid to rest in repositories.“

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