Georg Christoph Lichtenberg on Truth

"I have remarked very clearly that I am often of one opinion when I am lying down and of another when I am standing up."

"Delight at having understood a very abstract and obscure system leads most people to believe in the truth of what it demonstrates."

"It is almost impossible to bear the torch of truth through a crowd without singeing somebody’s beard."

"Even truth needs to be clad in new garments if it is to appeal to a new age."

"The most dangerous untruths are truths moderately distorted."

"All mathematical laws which we find in Nature are always suspect to me, in spite of their beauty. They give me no pleasure. They are merely auxiliaries. At close range it is all not true."

"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."

"Once the good man was dead, one wore his hat and another his sword as he had worn them, a third had himself barbered as he had, a fourth walked as he did, but the honest man that he was — nobody any longer wanted to be that."

"There were honest people long before there were Christians and there are, God be praised, still honest people where there are no Christians. It could therefore easily be possible that people are Christians because true Christianity corresponds to what they would have been even if Christianity did not exist."

"We often have need of a profound philosophy to restore to our feelings their original state of innocence, to find our way out of the rubble of things alien to us, to begin to feel for ourselves and to speak ourselves, and I might almost say to exist ourselves. Even if my philosophy does not extend to discovering anything new, it does nevertheless possess the courage to regard as questionable what has long been thought true."