12 Georg Christoph Lichtenberg Quotes on Human nature

Georg Christoph Lichtenberg quotes on human nature

8. 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.

9. 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.

34. Body and soul: a horse harnessed beside an ox.

40. A book is a mirror: if an ape looks into it an apostle is hardly likely to look out. We have no words for speaking of wisdom to the stupid. He who understands the wise is wise already.

53. 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.

66. Much can be inferred about a man from his mistress: in her one beholds his weaknesses and his dreams.

72. 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.

74. What is called an acute knowledge of human nature is mostly nothing but the observer's own weaknesses reflected back from others.

76. To err is human also in so far as animals seldom or never err, or at least only the cleverest of them do so.

92. 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.

101. Man loves company - even if it is only that of a small burning candle.

114. Of all the inventions of man I doubt whether any was more easily accomplished than that of a Heaven.