Georg Christoph Lichtenberg on Knowledge

"He who says he hates every kind of flattery, and says it in earnest, certainly does not yet know every kind of flattery."

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

"Cultivate that kind of knowledge which enables us to discover for ourselves in case of need that which others have to read or be told of."

"He who knows himself properly can very soon learn to know all other men. It is all reflection."

"You believe that I run after the strange because I do not know the beautiful; no, it is because you do not know the beautiful that I seek the strange."

"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."

"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..."

"Once we know our weaknesses they cease to do us any harm."

"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."

"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."

"It is certainly not a matter of indifference whether I learn something without effort or finally arrive at it myself through my system of thought. In the latter case everything has roots, in the former it is merely superficial."

"The "second sight" possessed by the Highlanders in Scotland is actually a foreknowledge of future events. I believe they possess this gift because they don't wear trousers... That is also why in all countries women are more prone to utter prophecies."

"As the few adepts in such things well know, universal morality is to be found in little everyday penny-events just as much as in great ones. There is so much goodness and ingenuity in a raindrop that an apothecary wouldn't let it go for less than half-a-crown."

"Food probably has a very great influence on the condition of men. Wine exercises a more visible influence, food does it more slowly but perhaps just as surely. Who knows if a well-prepared soup was not responsible for the pneumatic pump or a poor one for a war?"

"Cautiousness in judgment is nowadays to be recommended to each and every one: if we gained only one incontestable truth every ten years from each of our philosophical writers the harvest we reaped would be sufficient. … 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."