Lichtenberg - aphorisms

One might call habit a moral friction: something that prevents the mind from gliding over things but connects it with them and makes it hard for it to free itself from them.
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The fear of death which is imprinted in men is at the same time a great expedient Heaven employs to hinder them from many misdeeds: many things are left undone for fear of imperiling one's life or health.
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Prejudices are so to speak the mechanical instincts of men: through their prejudices they do without any effort many things they would find too difficult to think through to the point of resolving to do them.
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When Plato says the passions and natural desires are the wings of the soul he expresses himself in a very instructive way: such comparisons illuminate the subject and are as it were the translation of difficult concepts into a language familiar to everyone - true definitions.
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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 subjected. Cautiousness in judgement is nowadays to be recommended to each and everyone: if we gained only one incontestible truth every ten years from each of our philosophical writers the harvest we reaped would be sufficient.
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It is astonishing how infrequently we do what we regard as useful and would at the same time to be easy to do. The desire to know a lot in a short time often hinders us from precise examination, but even the man who knows this finds it very hard to test anything with precision, even though he knows that if he does not test he will fail to attain his goal of learning more.
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Whenever he was required to use his reason he felt like someone who had always used his right hand but was now required to do something with his left.
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He had an appetite for nothing yet he ate something of everything.
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...  not the slightest trace of genius ...
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Thera are very few things of which we can acquire a conception through all five senses.
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Every man also has his moral backside which he refrains from showing unless he has to and keeps as long as possible with trousers of decorum.
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Of all the animals on earth, man is closest to the ape.
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He had outgrown his library as one outgrows a waist-coat. Libraries con in general be to narrow or to wide for the soul.
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Human pride is a strong thing, it is not easy to suppress when hole A has been stopped up, before you know it it is peering out of hole B, and if that is closed it is already behind hole C, etc.
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There are two ways of extending  life: firstly by moving the two points "born" and "died" farther away from one another. The other method is to go more slowly and leave the two points wherever God wills they should be, and this method is for the philosophers...
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He was then in his fifty-fourth year, when even in the case of poets reason and passion begin to discuss a peace treaty and usually conclude it not very long afterwards.
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As the few adepts in such things well know, universal morality is to be found in little everyday penny-events just as in great ones...
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Whenever I for once pause a moment and think: But if you do this you will regret it in the future - my feelings interrupt me with "Nonsense!" and usually I have been convicted even before they finished speaking.
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If I should ever produce an edition of his life, go straight to the index and look up the words bottle and conceit: they will contain the most important facts about him.
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But Herr P. can certainly drink, someone said to me recently: first two bottles of wine, then 12 glasses of punch. What is his objective? If I understand him aright, it seems to me I could do all Herr P. is doing, and do it much quicker, if I fired a pistol at my head.
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We begin reading early and we often read much to much, so that we receive and retain in large amounts of material without putting it into employment and our memory becomes accustomed to keeping open house for taste and feeling; this being so, we often have need of a profound philosophy to restore to our feelings their original state of innocence, to find our way of the rabble of things alien to us, to begin to feel for ourselves and to speak ourselves, and I might also almost say to exist ourselves.
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How did you enjoy yourself with these people? Answer: very much, almost as much as I do when alone.
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To learn how to teach and test yourself brings much comfort and is not as dangerous as shaving yourself, everyone should learn it at a certain age for fear of one day becoming the victim of an ill-guided razor.
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If I did not have an inner conviction all the honor, plaudits and good fortune of the world would give me no satisfaction, and if I am satisfied in my own conviction the confirmation of whole world cannot deprive me of this pleasure...
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He had about him something the Hermhunters commonly call exaltation, the armchair theologies call piety, and the reasonable man of the world calls simple-mindness and want of understanding.
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To live when you do not want to is  dreadful, but it would be even more terrible to be immortal when you did not want to be. As things are, however, the whole ghastly burden is suspended from me by a thread which I can cut in two with a penny-knife.
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The more one grows (presuming one grows wiser with age) the more one loses hope of being able to write better than the authors of antiquity.
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Hour-glasses remind us, not only of how time flies, but at the same time of the dust into which we shall one day decay.
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That there are a hundred with wit for one with understanding is a true proposition with which many a witless Dummkopf consoles himself, when he should reflect - it that is not too much to ask of a Dummkopf - that there are also a hundred people possessing neither wit nor understanding for every one possessing wit.
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Diogenes, filthily attaired, paced accros the splendid carpets in Plato's dwellings. Thus, said he, I do trample on the pride of Plato. Yes, Plato replied, but only with another kind of pride.
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There is a spicies of bird which peaks holes in the thickest hollow trees, and it credits its beak with such strength that after each peak it is said to go on the other side of the tree to see whether or not the blow has gone right through it.
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Act as the wisest have acted before you, and do not commence your exercises in philosophy in those regions where an error can deliver you over the executioner.
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Every observer of human nature knows how hard it is to narrate experiences in such a way that no opinions or judgement interferes with the narrator.
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I have very often reflected on what it is that  really distinguishes the great genius fromnthe common crowd. Here are a few observations I have made. The common individual always conforms to the prevailing opinion and the prevailing fashion; he regards the state in which everything now exist as the only possible and passively accepts it all (...) To the great genius it always occurs to ask: Could this too not be false? He never gives his vote without first reflecting ...
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An increase in knowledge acquired too quickly and with too little participation of one's own part is not very fruitful: erudition can produce foliage without bearing fruit. There are a great many shallow heads who are astonishingly knowledgeable. What we have to discover for ourselves leaves behind in our mind a pathway that can be used on another occasion. Libraries will in the end become cities, said Leibniz.
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Do you ask me, friend which is better: to be plagued by a bad conscience or with a mind at peace to hang from the gallows?
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The pleasures of the imagination are as it were only drawings and models which are played with by poor people who cannot afford the real thing.
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Do you perhaps believe that your convictions owe their strength to arguments? Then you are certainly wrong, for otherwise everyone who hears them would have to be as convinced as you are. One can be deluded in fovor of a proposition as well as against it. Reason are often and for the most part only expositions of pretensions to something we would have done in any case...
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It is not hatred of vice but fear of the pilory, or Who can in any given case distinguish between virtue and fear of the pilory.
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Once we know our weaknesses they cease to do us any harm.
[??? - Our weaknesses do us harm for the very reason that they are our weaknesses; known, they perhaps do us less harm. ]
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Anyone who had from childhood on known the masterpieces of the human mind would make an incredulous face if ihe read some of our moderns. It would seem to him like music played on put-of-tune piano or on pots, pans and plates.
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We are only too inclined to believe that if we possess o little talent work must come easily to us. You must exert yourself, man, if you want to do something great.
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Comedy does not effect direct improvement, and perhaps satire does not do so either: I mean one does not abandon the vices they render ludicrous. What they can do, however, is to enlarge our horizon and increase the number of fixed points from which we can orientate ourselves in all the eventualities of life more quickly.
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I am too awakened, friend, and have attained to that degree of philosophical circumspection at which love of truth is my only guide and with the light has been granted me go to meet all I regard as error without exclaiming I regard that as an error, and even less That is error.
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What you have to do to learn to write like Shakespeare is very far removed from reading him.
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The first satire was certainly written for revenge. To employ it against vice for the betterment of one's fellow men rather than against the vicious is clearly an effete idea cooled down and made tame.
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Like a great philosophical babbler he is concerned not so much with the truth as with the sound of his prose.
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God created man in his own image, says Bible; the philosophers do the exact opposite, they create God in theirs.
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Devised with maximum of erudition and a minimum of common sense.
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One can repeat a thing in a way it has already been said, remove it further from human understanding, or bring it closer to it: the shallow mind does the first, the enthusiast the second, the true philosopher the third.
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When the book and a head collide and the hollow sound is heard, must it always come from the book?
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I can hardly believe it will ever be possible to prove that we are the work of a supreme being and not rather assembled together for his own amusement by a very imperfect one.
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... We ought to rather to cultivate that kind of knowledge which enables us to discover for ourselves in case of need that other have to read or to be told in order to know it.
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A list of printing errors in the list of printing errors.
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To do the opposite of something is also a form of imitation, namely an imitation of its opposite.
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We are obliged to regard many of our original minds as crazy at least until we have become as clever as they are.
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The land in which "honest fellow" and "poor wretcb" are terms of abuse, and to "take in" means to deceive.
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... Most people have no ideas, says Dr Price, they talk about a thing but they don't think: this is what I have several times called having an opinion.
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There is a great difference between still believing something and again believing it. Still to believe that the moon influences the planets betrays stupidity and superstition, but again to believe it displays philosophy and reflection.
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... he could dispute for hours on a subject without understanding a word about it.
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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 flavour it with lies.
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Nothing can contribute more to peace of soul than the lack of any opinion whatever.
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What? To debate a subject you have to know something about it? It is my view that debate requires that at least one of the disputants knows nothing of the subject under discussion, and that in so-called lively debate in its highest perfection neither party knows anything about it or is even aware of the meaning of what he is saying.
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A handful of soldiers is always better than a mouthful of arguments.
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It produced the effect good books usually produce: it made simple simpler, the clever cleverer, and all the other thousands remained unaffected.
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From the love of fatherland they write staff that gets our dear fatherland laughed at.
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I ceased in the year 1764 to believe that one can convince one's opponents with arguments printed in books. It is not to do that, therefore, that I have taken up my pen, but merely so as to annoy them, and to bestow strength and courage on those on our side, and to make it known to the others that they have not convinced us.
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Be wary of passing the judgement: obscure. To find something obscure possess no difficulty: elephants and poodles find many things obscure.
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Truth has a thousand obstacles to overcome before it can get safely down on to paper and from paper back into head. The lier is the least of its foes.
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If mankind suddenly becomes virtuous, many thousands would die of hunger.
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A book is a mirror: if ape looks into it an apostle is hardly to look out. We have no words for speaking of wisdom to the stupid. He who understands  wise is wise already.
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There they sit, with hands folded and eyes closed, and wait for Heaven to bestow on them the spirit of Shakespeare. ... [But] the basis of everything is observation and knowledge of the world, and you have to have observed a great deal yourself if you are to be able to employ observations of others as though they were your own.
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A man can condemn a good book as bad out of envy, want of judgement, or folly,  but Man cannot. ... A man can comment something bad and co den something good, but Man cannot.
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If people recount their dreams honestly, character could be divined more easily from them than from the face.
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A on his lips and not-A in his heart.
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The most heated defenders of science, who cannot endure the slightest sneer at it, are commonly those who have not made much progress in it and are secretly aware of this defect.
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To make clever people believe we are what we are not is in most instances harder than really to become what we want to be.
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Rouges would be more dangerous, or a new species of dangerous rogue would appear, if people began to study law in order to steal.
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Mixing with rational people is so greatly to be recommended to everyone because in this way even blockhead can learn to act sensibly by mimicry: for the greatest blockheads are able to mimic, even apes, poodles and elephants can do it.
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Something witty can be said against anything and for anything. A witty man could, of course, say something against this assertion that would perhaps make me regret it.
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Honest unaffected distrust of human abilities under all circumstances is the surest way of strength of mind.
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The oracles have not so much ceased to speak, rather men have ceased to listen to them.
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We say that someone occupies an official position, whereas it is the official position that occupies him.
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Man can acquire accomplishments or he can become an animal, whichever he wants. God makes the animal, man makes himself.
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Man has an irresistible instinct to believe he is not seen when he himself sees nothing. Like children who shut their eyes so as to not to be seen.
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Liskow says that the dreadful crowd of bad writers we have is very bit as able to plunge us into a state of barbarism as is horde of Ostrogoths and Visigoths. [Excellently said]
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All impartiality is artificial. Men is always partial and is quite right to be. Even impartiality is partial. He was of the party of the impartial.
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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.
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Thousands can see that proposition is nonsense without possessing the capacity formally to refute it.
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An ass was obliged to carry the image of Isis, and when the people fell down and worship the image he thought they were honoring him.
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Janet Macleod is the name of a girl who for many years on end at nothing ... People who except for a couple of magazines-crumbs have taken no mental food for ten years exist even among professors - it is, in fact, not at all uncommon.
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Much reading has brought upon us a learned barbarism.
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Her Camper related that when a missionary painted the flames of hell to a congregation of Greenlanders in a truly vivid fashion, and described at length the heat they gave out, all the Greenlanders began to feel a strong desire to go to hell.
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It is almost impossible to bear the tourch of truth through a crowd without singeing somebody's bear.
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What is called an acute knowledge of human nature is mostly nothing but observer's own weaknesses reflected back from others.
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Man who knows well how to observe themselves and are secretly proud of it often rejoice at the discovery of a weakness in themselves when the discovery ought to disturb them. That much higher do many rate the professor over the man.
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Where moderation is an error indifference is a crime.
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He marveled at the fact that cats had two holes cut in their fur at precisely the spot where their eyes were.
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There are people who can believe everything they want to: what fortunate creatures they are!
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There are very many people who read simply to prevent themselves from thinking.
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The most dangerous in truths are truths slightly distorted.
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He who is enamoured of himself will ateast have the advantage of being inconvenienced by a few rivals.
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Virtue by premeditation isn't worth much. Feeling or habit is the thing.
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Once he has stolen his 100 000 tales a rogue can walk through the world as honest man.
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Honor is infinitely more valuable than position of honor.
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In regard to the body there are if not more then as many who are sick in imagination as are sick in reality, in regard to the mind as many if not very many more who are healthy in imagination as are really healthy.
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Overwiseness is one of the most contemptible kinds of unwisdom.
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Use, use your powers: what now cost you effort will in the end become mechanical.
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To act absolutely in opposition to one's inclinations is certain in the end to lead to something better.
[Not for one with noble inclinations]
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You can make a good living from soothsaying, but not from truthsaying.
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S seldom does wrong, but what he does he usually does at the wrong time.
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One of the negro slaves on the plantation of literature.
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Attraction and repulsion - we speak of them as of different things, and linguistic usage indeed encourage us to do so. But by ascribing to bodies force of attraction and denying to them a force of repulsion we are dealing in one-sidedness of which reason cannot approve.
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With most people disbelief in a thing is founded on a blind belief in some other thing.
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Diminution of one's needs is something that certainly ought to be inculcated in youth. "The rear needs one has the happier one is" is an old but much-neglected truth.
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We talk a lot about enlightenment and desire more light. But my God, what is the use of light if people either have no eyes or intentionally shut those they have?
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Motto: to desire to discover the truth is meritorious, even if we go astray on the way.
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Nothing is more inimical to the progress of science than the belief that we know best we do not yet know. This is an error to which the inventor of fanciful hypotheses are commonly subject.
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Even if my philosophy does not extend to discovering anything new, it does nevertheless posses the courage to regard as questionable what has long been thought true.
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A golden rule: we must judge men not by their opinions, but by what these opinions make of them.
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Even the mistakes we so frequently make are useful in that in the end they accustom us to believe that everything may be different from what we imagine it to be.
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remembering never be amored at anything in the world (nil admirari)
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It is very better not to have studied a subject at all than to have studied it superficially. For when unaided healthy common sense seeks to form an opinion of some it does not go so far wrong as semi-erudition does.
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To establish liberty and equality as many people now thing of them would mean to producing an eleventh commandment through which the other ten would be abolished.
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We live in a world in which one fool can make many fools but one wise man only a few wise ones.
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Someone was asked to give a definition of God: God, he said is a sphere whose center is everywhere and whose surface in nowhere.