Johann Kaspar Lavater Quotes

110 Sourced Quotes

You may depend upon it that he is a good man whose intimate friends are all good, and whose enemies are decidedly bad.

Johann Kaspar Lavater
He who has no taste for order, will be often wrong in his judgment, and seldom considerate or conscientious in his actions.

Johann Kaspar Lavater
Say not you know another entirely, till you have divided an inheritance with him.

Johann Kaspar Lavater
Him, who incessantly laughs in the street, you may commonly hear grumbling in his closet.

Johann Kaspar Lavater
Let none turn over books, or roam the stars in quest of God, who sees him not in man.

Johann Kaspar Lavater
Depend on no man, on no friend but him who can depend on himself. He only who acts conscientiously toward himself, will act so toward others.

Johann Kaspar Lavater
He, who cannot forgive a trespass of malice to his enemy, has never yet tasted the most sublime enjoyment of love.

Johann Kaspar Lavater
To know man, borrow the ear of the blind and the eye of the deaf.

Johann Kaspar Lavater
There are but three classes of men: the retrograde, the stationary, the progressive.

Johann Kaspar Lavater
He who goes round about in his requests wants commonly more than he chooses to appear to want.

Johann Kaspar Lavater
He who has neither friend, nor enemy, is without talents, powers, or energy.

Johann Kaspar Lavater
A single spark of occasion discharges the child of passions into a thousand crackers of desire.

Johann Kaspar Lavater
If you see one cold and vehement at the same time, set him down for a fanatic.

Johann Kaspar Lavater
The cruelty of the effeminate is more dreadful than that or the hardy.

Johann Kaspar Lavater
Indiscretion, rashness, falsehood, levity, and malice, produce each other.

Johann Kaspar Lavater
A woman whose ruling passion is not vanity is superior to any man of equal capacity.

Johann Kaspar Lavater
How many women would laugh at the funerals of their husbands, if it were not the custom to weep!

Johann Kaspar Lavater
Neatness begets order; but from order to taste there is the same difference as from taste to genius, or from love to friendship.

Johann Kaspar Lavater
He who prays and bites has not a little of the devil in him.

Johann Kaspar Lavater
If you mean to know yourself, interline such of these aphorisms as affect you agreeably in reading, and set a mark to such as left a sense of uneasiness with you; and then show your copy to whom you please.

Johann Kaspar Lavater
Superstition always inspires littleness, religion grandeur of mind; the superstitious raises beings inferior to himself to deities.

Johann Kaspar Lavater
Who, under pressing temptations to lie, adheres to truth, nor to the profane betrays aught of a sacred trust, is near the summit of wisdom and virtue.

Johann Kaspar Lavater
As you treat your body, so your house, your domestics, your enemies, your friends. Dress is a table of your contents.

Johann Kaspar Lavater
Who knows whence he comes, where he is, and whither he tends, he, and he alone, is wise.

Johann Kaspar Lavater
Trust him with none of thy individualities who is, or pretends to be, two things at once.

Johann Kaspar Lavater