Quote

If it were true what in the end would be gained? Nothing but another truth. Is this such a mighty advantage? We have enough old truths still to digest, and even these we would be quite unable to endure if we did not sometimes flavor them with lies.

Georg C. Lichtenberg

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Georg C. Lichtenberg
Age: 56 †
Born: 1742
Born: July 1
Died: 1799
Died: February 24
Astronomer
French Moralist
Mathematician
Philosopher
Physicist
Scientist
University Teacher
Writer
København
Still
Lies
Flavor
Nothing
Quite
Gained
Enough
Lying
Deceit
Sometimes
Another
Mighty
Even
True
Unable
Would
Ends
Truths
Stills
Endure
Truth
Advantage
Digest

More quotes by Georg C. Lichtenberg

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Never undertake anything for which you wouldn't have the courage to ask the blessings of heaven.
Georg C. Lichtenberg
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It is almost impossible to carry the torch of truth through a crowd without singeing somebody's beard.
Georg C. Lichtenberg
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Some people feel with their heads and think with their hearts.
Georg C. Lichtenberg
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The most successful tempters and thus the most dangerous are the deluded deluders.
Georg C. Lichtenberg
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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.
Georg C. Lichtenberg
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There are two ways of extending life: firstly by moving the two points born and died farther away from one another. The other method is to go more slowly and leave the two points wherever God wills they should be, and this method is for the philosophers.
Georg C. Lichtenberg
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The motives that lead us to do anything might be arranged like the thirty-two winds and might be given names on the same pattern: for instance, bread-bread-fame or fame-fame-bread.
Georg C. Lichtenberg
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Everyone is a genius at least once a year.
Georg C. Lichtenberg
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A handful of soldiers is always better than a mouthful of arguments.
Georg C. Lichtenberg
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What makes our poetry so contemptible nowadays is its paucity of ideas. If you want to be read, invent. Who the Devil wouldn't like to read something new?
Georg C. Lichtenberg
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Non cogitant, ergo non sunt.
Georg C. Lichtenberg
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One's first step in wisdom is to question everything - and one's last is to come to terms with everything.
Georg C. Lichtenberg
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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.
Georg C. Lichtenberg
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Before one blames, one should always find out whether one cannot excuse. To discover little faults has been always the particularity of such brains that are a little or not at all above the average. The superior ones keep quiet or say something against the whole and the great minds transform without blaming.
Georg C. Lichtenberg
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One of our forefathers must have read a forbidden book.
Georg C. Lichtenberg
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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.
Georg C. Lichtenberg
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If an angel were to tell us about his philosophy, I believe many of his statements might well sound like '2 x 2= 13'.
Georg C. Lichtenberg
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The journalists have constructed for themselves a little wooden chapel, which they also call the Temple of Fame, in which they put up and take down portraits all day long and make such a hammering you can't hear yourself speak.
Georg C. Lichtenberg
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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.
Georg C. Lichtenberg
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One has to do something new in order to see something new.
Georg C. Lichtenberg