The most dangerous untruths are truths slightly distorted.
— Georg C. Lichtenberg
He who says he hates every kind of flattery, and says it in earnest, certainly does not yet know every kind of flattery.
The noble simplicity in the works of nature only too often originates in the noble shortsightedness of him who observes it.
Many things about our bodies would not seem to us so filthy and obscene if we did not have the idea of nobility in our heads.
Be wary of passing the judgment: obscure. To find something obscure poses no difficult, elephants and poodles find many things obscure.
The human tendency to regard little things as important has produced very many great things.
One might call habit a moral friction: something that prevents the mind from gliding over things but connects it with them and makes it hard for it to free itself from them.
When an acquaintance goes by I often step back from my window, not so much to spare him the effort of acknowledging me as to spare myself the embarrassment of seeing that he has not done so.
What is called an acute knowledge of human nature is mostly nothing but the observer's own weaknesses reflected back from others.
With a pen in my hand I have successfully stormed bulwarks from which others armed with sword and excommunication have been repulsed.
It is a question whether, when we break a murderer on the wheel, we do not fall into the error a child makes when it hits the chair it has bumped into.
A handful of soldiers is always better than a mouthful of arguments.
Nowadays three witty turns of phrase and a lie make a writer.
We are obliged to regard many of our original minds as crazy at least until we have become as clever as they are.
That man is the noblest creature may also be inferred from the fact that no other creature has yet contested this claim.
A book is a mirror: if an ape looks into it an apostle is hardly likely to look out.
Nothing makes one old so quickly as the ever-present thought that one is growing older.
The most perfect ape cannot draw an ape; only man can do that; but, likewise, only man regards the ability to do this as a sign of superiority.
Erudition can produce foliage without bearing fruit.
If the little bit you have is nothing special in itself, at least find a way of saying it that is a little bit special.
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.
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.
To be content with life or to live merrily, rather all that is required is that we bestow on all things only a fleeting, superficial glance; the more thoughtful we become the more earnest we grow.
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.
Just as the performance of the vilest and most wicked deeds requires spirit and talent, so even the greatest demand a certain insensitivity which under other circumstances we would call stupidity.
Delight at having understood a very abstract and obscure system leads most people to believe in the truth of what it demonstrates.
It is in the gift for employing all the vicissitudes of life to one's own advantage and to that of one's craft that a large part of genius consists.
Sickness is mankind's greatest defect.
We say that someone occupies an official position, whereas it is the official position that occupies him.
The American who first discovered Columbus made a bad discovery.
Much can be inferred about a man from his mistress: in her one beholds his weaknesses and his dreams.
We accumulate our opinions at an age when our understanding is at its weakest.
The sure conviction that we could if we wanted to is the reason so many good minds are idle.
Nothing can contribute more to peace of soul than the lack of any opinion whatever.
Man is to be found in reason, God in the passions.
If people should ever start to do only what is necessary millions would die of hunger.
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.
Man is a masterpiece of creation if for no other reason than that, all the weight of evidence for determinism notwithstanding, he believes he has free will.
Once we know our weaknesses they cease to do us any harm.
To receive applause for works which do not demand all our powers hinders our advance towards a perfecting of our spirit. It usually means that thereafter we stand still.
Actual aristocracy cannot be abolished by any law: all the law can do is decree how it is to be imparted and who is to acquire it.
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.
There exists a species of transcendental ventriloquism by means of which men can be made to believe that something said on earth comes from Heaven.
It is almost everywhere the case that soon after it is begotten the greater part of human wisdom is laid to rest in repositories.
Even truth needs to be clad in new garments if it is to appeal to a new age.
With most people disbelief in a thing is founded on a blind belief in some other thing.
With prophecies the commentator is often a more important man than the prophet.
I am convinced we do not only love ourselves in others but hate ourselves in others too.
To err is human also in so far as animals seldom or never err, or at least only the cleverest of them do so.
Virtue by premeditation isn't worth much.
