Top 75 Quotes by Georg C. Lichtenberg

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.

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

To grow wiser means to learn to know better and better the faults to which this instrument with which we feel and judge can be subject.

Erudition can produce foliage without bearing fruit.

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

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.

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

Nowadays three witty turns of phrase and a lie make a writer.

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.

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.