To many people virtue consists chiefly in repenting faults, not in avoiding them.

This remark is characteristic of Georg Christoph Lichtenberg’s posthumously published “Sudelbücher” (waste books), the private notebooks in which he jotted aphorisms, satirical observations, and moral-psychological reflections rather than polished essays. In late–18th-century Protestant Germany, public morality often emphasized confession, contrition, and the rhetoric of repentance. Lichtenberg, a sharp critic of self-deception and social hypocrisy, repeatedly targets the way people convert moral life into a cycle of wrongdoing followed by self-congratulatory remorse. The line belongs to that notebook tradition: a brief, pointed diagnosis of how “virtue” can be redefined to flatter the conscience without changing behavior.

Lichtenberg’s aphorism targets a common moral self-deception: people may treat “virtue” as a dramatic after-the-fact performance—confession, remorse, and self-reproach—rather than the quieter discipline of preventing wrongdoing in the first place. The line implies that repentance can become a substitute for ethical vigilance, allowing repeated lapses so long as they are followed by suitably intense contrition. It also hints at a social dimension: repentance is visible and narratable, while avoidance is private and uncelebrated. The remark fits Lichtenberg’s skeptical, Enlightenment-era habit of puncturing pious moral posturing and insisting that character is measured more by conduct than by feelings about conduct.