Top 100 Lavater Quotes
#1. Who partakes in another's joys is a more humane character than he who partakes in his griefs.
Johann Kaspar Lavater
#2. He who is passionate and hasty is generally honest. It is your cool, dissembling hypocrite of whom you should beware.
Johann Kaspar Lavater
#3. Evasions are the common shelter of the hard-hearted, the false and impotent when called upon to assist; the really great alone plan instantaneous help, even when their looks or words presage difficulties.
Johann Kaspar Lavater
#4. A single spark of occasion discharges the child of passions into a thousand crackers of desire.
Johann Kaspar Lavater
#6. What is the elevation of the soul? A prompt, delicate, certain feeling for all that is beautiful, all that is grand; a quick resolution to do the greatest good by the smallest means; a great benevolence joined to a great strength and great humility.
Johann Kaspar Lavater
#8. 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
#11. As you treat your body, so your house, your domestics, your enemies, your friends. Dress is a table of your contents.
Johann Kaspar Lavater
#14. Superstition always inspires littleness, religion grandeur of mind; the superstitious raises beings inferior to himself to deities.
Johann Kaspar Lavater
#15. A beautiful smile is to the female countenance what the sunbeam is to the landscape; it embellishes an inferior face and redeems an ugly one.
Johann Kaspar Lavater
#18. Who knows whence he comes, where he is, and whither he tends, he, and he alone, is wise.
Johann Kaspar Lavater
#20. I am prejudiced in favor of him who, without impudence, can ask boldly. He has faith in humanity, and faith in himself. No one who is not accustomed to giving grandly can ask nobly and with boldness.
Johann Kaspar Lavater
#22. Kiss the hand of him who can renounce what he has publicly taught, when convicted of his error; and who, with heartfelt joy, embraces the truth, though with the sacrifice of favorite opinions.
Johann Kaspar Lavater
#23. What do I owe to my times, to my country, to my neighbors, to my friends? Such are the questions which a virtuous man ought often to ask himself.
Johann Kaspar Lavater
#24. The discovery of truth, by slow progressive meditation, is wisdom.
Intuition of truth, not preceded by perceptible meditation, is genius.
Johann Kaspar Lavater
#25. Man without religion is a diseased creature, who would persuade himself he is well and needs not a physician; but woman without religion is raging and monstrous.
Johann Kaspar Lavater
#26. It is a poor wit who lives by borrowing the words, decisions, mien, inventions and actions of others.
Johann Kaspar Lavater
#28. The enemy of art is the enemy of nature; art is nothing but the highest sagacity and exertions of human nature; and what nature will he honor who honors not the human?
Johann Kaspar Lavater
#30. The more unharmonious and inconsistent your objects of desire, the more inconsequent, inconstant, unquiet, the more ignoble, idiotical, and criminal yourself.
Johann Kaspar Lavater
#31. The more uniform a man's voice, step, manner of conversation, handwriting
the more quiet, uniform, settled, his actions, his character.
Johann Kaspar Lavater
#33. There are three classes of men; the retrograde, the stationary and the progressive.
Johann Kaspar Lavater
#34. He who goes round about in his requests wants commonly more than he chooses to appear to want.
Johann Kaspar Lavater
#35. Say not you know another entirely till you have divided an inheritance with him.
Johann Kaspar Lavater
#36. He who attempts to make others believe in means which he himself despises is a puffer; he who makes use of more means than he knows to be necessary is a quack; and he who ascribes to those means a greater efficacy than his own experience warrants is an impostor.
Johann Kaspar Lavater
#39. He who, silent, loves to be with us - he who loves us in our silence - has touched one of the keys that ravish hearts.
Johann Kaspar Lavater
#40. Avoid him who from mere curiosity asks three questions running about a thing that cannot interest Him.
Johann Kaspar Lavater
#42. Trust him not with your secrets, who, when left alone in your room, turns over your papers.
Johann Kaspar Lavater
#43. Desire is the uneasiness a man finds in himself upon the absence of anything whose present enjoyment carries the idea of delight with it.
Johann Kaspar Lavater
#45. You may tell a man thou art a fiend, but not your nose wants blowing; to him alone who can bear a thing of that kind, you may tell all.
Johann Kaspar Lavater
#52. A gift
its kind, its value and appearance; the silence or the pomp that attends it; the style in which it reaches you
may decide the dignity or vulgarity of the giver.
Johann Kaspar Lavater
#55. 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
#57. The prudent see only the difficulties, the bold only the advantages, of a great enterprise; the hero sees both; diminishes the former and makes the latter preponderate, and so conquers.
Johann Kaspar Lavater
#58. If you wish to appear agreeable in society, you must consent to be taught many things which you know already.
Johann Kaspar Lavater
#59. Who despises all that is despicable is made to be impressed with all that is grand.
Johann Kaspar Lavater
#61. He who, in questions of right, virtue, or duty, sets himself above all ridicule, is truly great, and shall laugh in the end with truer mirth than ever he was laughed at.
Johann Kaspar Lavater
#63. The manner of giving shows the character of the giver, more than the gift itself.
Johann Kaspar Lavater
#64. Who is respectable when thinking himself alone and free from observation will be so before the eye of all the world.
Johann Kaspar Lavater
#65. He who, when called upon to speak a disagreeable truth, tells it boldly and has done is both bolder and milder than he who nibbles in a low voice and never ceases nibbling.
Johann Kaspar Lavater
#66. Trust him little who praise all, him less who censures all and him least who is indifferent about all.
Johann Kaspar Lavater
#68. Beware of biting jests; the more truth they carry with them, the greater wounds they give, the greater smarts they cause, and the greater scars they leave behind them.
Johann Kaspar Lavater
#70. There is a manner of forgiveness so divine that you are ready to embrace the offender for having called it forth.
Johann Kaspar Lavater
#73. Who, in the midst of just provocation to anger, instantly finds the fit word which settles all around him in silence is more than wise or just; he is, were he a beggar, of more than royal blood, he is of celestial descent.
Johann Kaspar Lavater
#76. Strange that cowards cannot see that their greatest safety lies in dauntless courage.
Johann Kaspar Lavater
#78. Know in the first place, that mankind agree in essence, as they do in limbs and senses.
Johann Kaspar Lavater
#79. To know yourself you have only to set down a true statement of those that ever loved or hated you.
Johann Kaspar Lavater
#80. His calumny is not only the greatest benefit a rogue can confer on us, but the only service he will perform for nothing.
Johann Kaspar Lavater
#82. He who reforms himself has done more towards reforming the public than a crowd or noisy, impotent patriots.
Johann Kaspar Lavater
#83. You are not very good if you are not better than your best friends imagine you to be.
Johann Caspar Lavater
#86. He who freely praises what he means to purchase, and he who enumerates the faults of what he means to sell, may set up a partnership with honesty.
Johann Kaspar Lavater
#88. Who begins with severity, in judging of another, ends commonly with falsehood.
Johann Kaspar Lavater
#91. Faces are as legible as books, only with these circumstances to recommend them to our perusal, that they are read in much less time, and are much less likely to deceive us.
Johann Kaspar Lavater
#93. In the society of ladies, want of sense is not so unpardonable as want of manners.
Johann Kaspar Lavater
#94. Who forces himself on others is to himself a load. Impetuous curiosity is empty and inconstant. Prying intrusion may be suspected of whatever is little.
Johann Kaspar Lavater
#95. He is incapable of a truly good action who finds not a pleasure in contemplating the good actions of others.
Johann Kaspar Lavater
#98. Take here the grand secret; if not of pleasing all, yet of displeasing none, and court mediocrity, avoid originality, and sacrifice to fashion.
Johann Kaspar Lavater
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