Georg C. Lichtenberg People Quotations

With most people disbelief in a thing is founded on a blind belief in some other thing.

There are very many people who read simply to prevent themselves from thinking.

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

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.

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

Some men come by the name of genius in the same way as an insect comes by the name of centipede - not because it has a hundred feet, but because most people can't count above fourteen

It is in most cases more difficult to make intelligent people believe that you are what you are not, than really to become what you would appear to be.

There were honest people long before there were Christians and there are, God be praised, still honest people where there are no Christians. It could therefore easily be possible that people are Christians because true Christianity corresponds to what they would have been even if Christianity did not exist.

I have often noticed that when people come to understand a mathematical proposition in some other way than that of the ordinary demonstration, they promptly say, "Oh, I see. That's how it must be." This is a sign that they explain it to themselves from within their own system.

We can see nothing whatever of the soul unless it is visible in the expression of the countenance; one might call the faces at a large assembly of people a history of the human soul written in a kind of Chinese ideograms.

People who never have any time on their hands are those who do the least.

To make astute people believe one is what one is not is, in most cases, harder than actually to become what one wishes to appear.

To many people virtue consists chiefly in repenting faults, not in avoiding them.

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.

Many intelligent people, when about to write . . . , force on their minds a certain notion about style, just as they screw up their faces when they sit for their portraits.

People nowadays have such high hopes of America and the political conditions obtaining there that one might say the desires, at least the secret desires, of all enlightened Europeans are deflected to the west, like our magnetic needles.

How happily some people would live if they troubled themselves as little about other people's business as about their own.

No people are more conceited than those who depict their own feelings, especially if they happen to have a little prose at their command for the occasion.

I am grateful that I am not as judgmental as all those censorious, self-righteous people around me. In each of us there is a little of all of us.

Some people feel with their heads and think with their hearts.

There are many who believe that 'Marriage is not a word - it is a sentence!' Whether you are indeed 'married' or if you are 'single', I am sure that funny quotes on weddings and marriages always tend to put a wicked smile to the face. It is often said that 'People who are married are often desperate to get out of it and people who are single can't wait to get in!'

There can hardly be a stranger commodity in the world than books. Printed by people who don't understand them; sold by people who don't understand them; bound, criticized and read by people who don't understand them; and now even written by people who don't understand them.

There are people who can believe anything they wish. What lucky creatures!

There are people who think that everything one does with a serious face is sensible.

Some people read only because they are too lazy to think.

People who have read a good deal rarely make great discoveries. I do not say this in excuse of laziness, but because invention presupposes an extensive independent contemplation of things.

Superstition originates among ordinary people in the early and all too zealous instruction they receive in religion: they hear of mysteries, miracles, deeds of the Devil, and consider it very probable that things of this sort could occur in everything anywhere.

If all mankind were suddenly to practice honesty, many thousands of people would be sure to starve