Georg C. Lichtenberg World Quotations

One can live in this world on soothsaying but not on truth saying.

Is it so unjust that a man should leave the world by the same gate through which he entered it?

In the world we live in, one fool makes many fools, but one sage only a few sages.

Truly, men make too little use of their lives; and so it is no wonder that the world should still be in such a poor way.

Ideas too are a life and a world.

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.

If there were only turnips and potatoes in the world, someone would complain that plants grow the wrong way.

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.

The greatest things in the world are brought about by other things which we count as nothing: little causes we overlook but which at length accumulate.

What concerns me alone I only think, what concerns my friends I tell them, what can be of interest to only a limited public I write, and what the world ought to know is printed...

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.

A book which, above all others in the world, should be forbidden, is a catalogue of forbidden books.

A good method of discovery is to imagine certain members of a system removed and then see how what is left would behave: for example, where would we be if iron were absent from the world: this is an old example.