The Art of Having Something to Say Part 10: Lichtenberg

"When sometimes I had drunk a lot of coffee. . ." and Other Aphorisms 

1.5 Rousseau was right to call accent the soul of speech, and we often regard people as stupid and when we look into it we find it is merely the simple sound of their manner of speaking.

1.7 If we want to draw up a philosophy that will be useful to us in life, or if we want to offer universal rules for a perpetually contented life, then, to be sure, we have to abstract from that which introduces a much too great diversity into our contemplations - somewhat as we often do in mathematics when we forget friction and other similar particular properties of bodies so that the calculation will not be too difficult for us, or at least replace such properties with a single letter. Small misfortunes incontestably introduce a large measure of uncertainty into these practical rules, so that we have to dismiss them from our mind and turn our attention only to overcoming the greater misfortunes. This is incontestably the true meaning of certain propositions of the Stoic philosophy.

1.16 When sometimes I had drunk a lot of coffee, and was consequently startled by anything, I noticed quite distinctly that I was startled before I heard the noise: we thus hear as it were with other organs as well as with our ears.

1.20 A sensation expressed in words is like music described in words: the expressions we use are not sufficiently at one with the thing to be expressed. The poet who wants to excite sympathy directs the reader to a painting, and through this to the thing to be expressed. A painted landscape gives instant delight, but one celebrated in verse has first to be painted in the reader's own head. . .

1.25 The animalcula infusoria are bladders with desires.

1.26 It is we who are the measure of what is strange and miraculous: if we sought a universal measure, the strange and miraculous would not occur and all things would be equal.

1.29 The contention over signification and being which has caused such mischief in religion would perhaps have been more salutary if it had been conducted in respect to other subjects, for it is a general source of misfortune to us that we believe things are in actuality what they in fact only signify.

1.32 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.

1.35 The peasant who believes the moon is no bigger than a plough wheel never reflects that at a distance of a few miles a whole church appears only as a white speck but the moon on the contrary seems always to be the same size: what prevents him from connecting these ideas, which are all presented to hm distinctly? In his ordinary life he does in fact connect ideas and perhaps does so by more artificial connections than these. This reflection should make the philosopher pay heed: perhaps in some of the connections he makes he is still a peasant. We think early in life but we do not know we are thinking, any more than we know we are growing or digesting; many ordinary people never do discover it. Close observation of external things easily leads back to the point of observation, ourselves, and conversely he who is for once wholly aware of himself easily proceeds from that to obseving things around him. Be attentive, feel nothing in vain, measure and compare: this is the whole law of philosophy.

1.37 The philosophy of mankind as such is the philosophy of one certain individual man corrected by the philosophy of others, even of fools, and this in accordance with the rules of a rational assessment of degrees of probability. Propositions on which all men are in agreement are true: if they are not true we have no truth at all.

1.38 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 subject. Cautiousness in judgements is nowadays to be recommended to each and every one: if we gained only one incontestable truth every ten years from each of our philosophical writers the harvest we reaped would be sufficient.

2.10 Everyone ought to study at least as much philosophy and belles lettres as will serve to heighten his sensual pleasures, If our country squires, courtiers, counts and others took note of this they would often be astounded at the effect a book can produce. . .

2.14 Character of someone I know. His body is such that even a bad draughtsman could draw it better in the dark, and if it lay in his power to alter it many parts of it would be less obtrusive. Although his health is not of the best, this man has always been more or less content with it, and he possesses to a high degree the gift of making good use of healthy days. On such days his imagination, the most loyal of his companions, never deserts him; he stands at the window with his head between his hands, and if the passer-by sees nothing but a moper with his head in his hands he himself often silently confesses he has again been indulging in an excess of pleasure. He has but few friends, in fact his heart is open only to one who is actually present, though for several who are absent; his courtesy and complaisance make many believe he is their friend, and he does indeed serve them, but it is out of ambition or philanthropy, and not from the instinct that drives him to be a servant of his real friends. He has loved only once or twice, the first time not unhappily but the second time very happily; he gained through cheerfulness and levity alone a good heart through which he now often forgets both, though he will always revere cheerfulness and levity as qualities of his own soul which have procured for him the pleasantest hours of his life; and if he could choose another life and another soul I do not know that he would choose different ones if he could have his own back again. Even as a boy he was very free and independent of mind as regards religion, but never thought it would do him honour to be a free-spirit, nor however that to believe everything without exception would do him honour either. He is capable of fevent prayer and has never been able to read the 90th Psalm without an indescribable feeling of exaltation. Before the mountains were brought forth etc. means infinitely more to him than Sing, immortal soul etc. He does not know whom he hates more, young officers or young clergymen, but he could not live long with either of them. For assemblies his figure and his dress have seldom been good enough or his sentiments sufficiently - . He hopes never to have more than three courses for lunch and two for dinner, with a little wine, or less than potatoes, apples, bread and also a little wine every day: more than the one and less than the other would both make him unwell, as they always have done when for a few days he has lived beyond their boundaries. Reading and writing are as necessary to him as eating and drinking, and he hopes he will never be without books. He thinks about death very often and never with aversion; he wishes he could think about everything with so much composure, and hopes his Creator will one day demand of him gently a life of which he was, though not a particularly economical, a by no means profligate possessor.

2.17 He was so witty that any thing served him as an intermediate term for comparing any pair of other things with one another.

2.18 It is silly to assert that we are sometimes not really in the mood for anything; I believe that the moment in which we feel strong enough to suppress one of our principal drives, namely the drive to work and act, is the moment when we are perhaps best fitted to undertake the strangest and greatest things. The state we are in is a kind of langour in which the soul percieves as much that is uncommonly small as when in a state of ardent enthusiasm it does that which is uncommonly big; and as this latter state can be compared with the bold undertakings of the astronomers, so the former can be compared with the exertions of a Leeuwenhoek [ ].

2.21 Human pride is a strange thing, it is not easy to suppress: when hole A has been stoped up, before you know it it is peering out of hole B, and if that is closed it is already behind hole C, etc.

2.25 Sometimes I do not go out of the house for a week and live very contentedly: an equal period of house-arrest would make me ill. Where freedom is possible we move easily in our circle; where thought is under constraint even permitted thoughts come forth nervously.

2.27 Drinking, provided it is not indulged in before the age of 35, is not so greatly to be censured as many of my readers will imagine. This is approximately the time when a man emerges from the aberrant paths of his life out on to the plateau upon which he sees his future course lying open before him. It is depressing if, now discovering it is not the right course, his should be too weak on his feet at this stage to seek another. Should this discovery be attended by a sense of disquietude, experience has taught that wine sometimes works miracles; that five or six glasses put a man in the situation he has otherwise failed to attain . . .

2.30 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.


2.31 The only thing about him that was manly he was obliged to conceal for the sake of his comfort and well-being.

2.34 He possessed a great deal of philosophy, or of common sense that looked like it.

2.37 Speech of a suicide composed shortly before the act. Friends! I stand at this moment before the veil on the point of raising it so as to see whether it will be more peaceful and quiet behind it than it is here. This is no impulse born of a mad despair; I know too well the fetters of my days from the few links in the chain I have lived through. I am too tired to go on, here I shall die clean away or at least stay overnight. Here take back the stuff that I am, nature, knead it back into the dough of being, make of me a bush, a cloud, whatever you will, even a man, only no longer make me me. Thanks be to phiosophy that no pious buffooneries now disturb the train of my thoughts. Enough: I think, I fear nothing, very well, up with the curtain!-

2.39 It was a rash act, I performed it with that ardour without which my life would be worth far less than it is; I bitterly reproached myself as I finally went to bed, but my feelings were lighter by a considerable moral weight.

2.44 If an angel were ever to tell us anything of his philosophy I believe many propositions would sound like 2 times 2 equals 13.

2.45 He could not comprehend why there sometimes arose in him irresistible desires which he was none the less wholly debarred from satisfying. He often posed this question to Heaven as the subject of a prize competition and promised to reward a satisfactory answer with a complete denial of his former self and a calm and patient submission.

2.46 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.

2.49 We begin reading early and we often read much too much, so that we receive and retain 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 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 amost say to exist ourselves.

2.52 What concerns me alone I only think, what concerns my friends I tell them, what can be of interest to only a limited public I write, and what the world ought to know is printed . . .

2.57 It is a fault which the merely clever writer has in common with the downright bad one that he commonly fails to illumintate his actual subject but employs it only to show off. We get to know the writer but nothing else . . .

3.3 Never before had a mind come to a more majestic halt.

3.7 He travelled through Northeim to Einbeck and from there through Mlle P. to Hanover.

3.12 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 - if 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.

3.22 Just as fear created gods, so an impulse for security imprinted in us creates ghosts. People who are not timorous or superstitious or cracked in the head see no spirits. The impulse for security which in a forest or at night gives me the warning: guard yourself against attack - this alone would suffice to produce ghosts even if there were no visionaries to hand who actually see them . . .

3.23 Astronomy is perhaps the science whose discoveries owe least to chance, in which human understanding appears in its whole magnitude, and though which man can best learn how small he is.

3.30 A punishment in a dream is still a punishment. On the utility of dreams.

3.52 When someone likes doing something very much he almost always has some interest in the thing that is greater than the thing itself . . .

4.4 That our ancestors accorded so much importance to 'judgements of God' and attached such value to miraculous tests of innocence is certainly to be excused on account of their simplicity: their age was already sufficiently cultivated no longer to listen to prophecies but not yet sufficiently cultivated to see that to desire that God should permit the innocent to walk over red-hot iron unsinged would be contrary to his wisdom. This was reserved for our age. Nowadays certain philosophers are already beginning to make out they believe it would be contrary to God's wisdom and greatness for him to concern himself with the world at all.

4.12 Whenever he composes a critical review, I have been told, he gets a tremendous erection.

4.13 Zezu Island. This island has remained undescribed for so onlg because the foolish customs of its inhabitants gave publishers everywhere the idea that an account of it was a satire on their own country . . .

4.14 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.

4.17 What you have to do to learn to write like Shakespeare is very far removed from reading him.

4.20 The journalists have constructed for themselves a little wooden chapel, which they also the Temple of Fame, in which they put up and take down portraits all day long and make such a hammering you can't hear yourself speak.

4.24 The ideas and thoughts we have when awake, what are they but dreams? If while I am awake I think of friends who are dead the story proceeds without its occurring to me they are dead, as in a dream. I imagine I have won a grand lottery: at that moment I have won it, the thought that comes later that I have not won it I encounter only afterwards as an attestation of the contrary. The actual possession of something sometimes affords us no greater pleasure than the mere idea that we possess it. We can ameliorate our dreams if we abstain from meat in the evening, but what about our waking dreams? -

4.26 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 already an effete idea cooled down and made tame.

4.32 When carrying out a piece of work always keep in mind confidence in yourself, a noble pride, and the thought that those who avoid the mistakes you make are no better than you, for they make mistakes you have avoided.

4.33 Describe a library situated in a madhouse, together with the librarian's remarks on the books . . .

4.37 An affected earnestness that ends in a moral paralysis of the facial muscles.

4.40 Hume says in his essay on national characteristics that the English have of all nations least national character.

4.53 No work, and especially no work of literature, should display the effort it has cost. A writer who wants to be read by posterity must not neglct to drop into odd corners of his chapters such hints at whole books, ideas for disputations, that his readers will believe he has thousands of them to throw away.

4.55 It is useful for a philosopher to know that men act always out of self-interest, only he must not act in accordance with this knowledge but order his actions in accordance with the usage of the world. Just as a good writer does not depart from the common usage of words, so a good citizen must not straightaway depart from the normal usage in the realm of actions, even though he may have much to object to in both.

4.59 It requires no especially great talent to write in such a way that another will be very hard put to understand what you have written.

4.68 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.

4.72 You must never think: the proposition is too difficult for me, it is something for great scholars, I shall turn to this other one instead; this is a weakness that can easily degenrate into complete inactivity. You must not think yourself too humble for anything.

4.76 The English follow their feeling more than other men, which is why they are so much inclined to posit novel senses: sense of truth, of moral beauty, etc.

4.78 Metaphorical language is a species of natural language which we construct out of arbitrary but concrete words. That is why it so pleasing.

4.82 He had constructed for himself a certain system which thereafter excercised such an influence on his way of thinking that those who observed him always saw his judgement walking a few steps in front of his feeling, though he himself believed it was keeping to the rear.

4.85 You must keep two objectives constatnly in mind when you are reading if you are to read wisely and judiciously: firstly to retain the matter you are reading and to unite it with your own system of thought, then above all to appropriate for your own the way in which other people have viewed this matter. That is why everyone should be warned against reading books written by bunglers, especially when they include their reasonings and arguments: you can learn of various matters from their compilations but - what is to a philosopher just as important, if not more important - you cannot learn from them how to bestow upon your mode of thinking an appropriate form.

4.87 Most of the expressions we use are metaphorical: they contain the philosophy of our ancestors . . .

4.89 Many people know everything they know in the way we know the solution of a riddle after we have read it or been told it, and that is the worst kind of knowledge and the kind least to be cultivated; we ought rather to cultivate that kind of knowldege which enables us to discover for ourselves in case of need that which others have to read or be told of in order to know it. . . .

4.96 To do the opposite of something is also a form of imitation, namely an imitation of its opposite.

4.100 She stood there beside him like an Etrurian lachrymatory, a Dresden milk-jug beside a Lauenstein beer-mug.

4.101 It cannot be denied that the word nonsense, if spoken with the appropriate face and voice, has something that yields little or nothing to the words chaos and eternity themselves. One senses a shock which, if my feelings do not decive me, originates in a fuga vacui of the human understanding.

4.102 It is impossible to have bad taste, but many people have none at all. 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.

5.10 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 them with lies.

5.15 What? to debate a subject you have to know something about it? It is my view that a debate requires that at least one of the disputants knows nothing of the subject under discussion, and that in a 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 . . . When I was in England the American question was debated in every ale-house, coffee-house, crossroads and stagecoach, and even in the council of aldermen at whose head Wilkes stood, in accordance with the rules of lively debate; and when some poor simpleton once stood up and suggested it might be a good thing to examine the subject seriously before coming to a decision, another man expressly objected that this would be a wearisome task and lead them too far astray, and that a decision should be taken without further ado - which, because it was almost dinner time, was the course agreed upon.

5.23 Do you thickheads perhaps believe that your exaggerated delicacy, and your dissatisfaction with what we good-naturedly do for you, is evidence of discernment in you? Oh you poor fools, there are poodles and elephants who can do as much. I myself have seen a horse who preferred Horace to Pope.

5.27 It produced the effect good books usually produce: it made the simple simpler, the clever cleverer, and all the other thousands remained unaffected.

5.28 Do not make a book out of material actually suited to a piece in a magazine, nor out of two words a sentence. What an idiot says in a book would be endurable if he could express it in three words.

5.33 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 own side, and to make it known to the others that they have not convinced us.

5.41 Demonstrators where there is nothing to demonstrate. There is a kind of empty chatter which can be made to seem full through the employment of novel expressions and unexpected metaphors. Klopstock and Lavater are masters of it. As a joke it will pass. Intended seriously it is unforgivable.

5.46 In the villages of Germany the hour of the ghosts is between 11 and 12 at night - which enables the ghosts to get to the cities in time for the city's ghost-hour, which is between eight and nine in the morning . . .

5.49 A book is a mirror: if an ape looks into it an apostle is hardly likely to look out. We have no words for speaking of wisdom to the stupid. He who understands the wise is wise already.

5.50 Man is not so hard to know as many a stay-at-home believes when in his dressing-gown he rejoices to discover that one of La Rochefoucauld's remarks is true. I believe, indeed, that most people know men better than they themselves are aware of, and that they make great use of their knowledge in everday life. . .

5.57 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 the observations of others as though they were your own. . .

5.60 Faugh! to dwell on such trifles is to bring up a batter of artillery against a flock of wagtails: sensible people will find it hard to say whether you delivered the blow or received it.

5.63 Oh, that must be one of the three wise men of Switzerland.

5.65 Do we write books so that they shall merely be read? Don't we also write them for employment in the household? For one that is read from start to finish, thousands are leafed through, other thousands lie motionless, others are jammed against mousehoules, thrown at rats, others are stood on, sat on, drummed on, have gingerbread baked on them or are used to light pipes with.

5.66 A good expression is worth as much as a good idea, because it is almost impossible to express oneself well without throwing a favourable light on that which is expressed.

5.67 Now that we know nature thoroughly, a child can see that in making experiments we are simply paying nature compliments. It is no more than a ceremonial ritual. We know the answers in advance. We consult nature in the same way as great rulers consult their parliaments.

5.69 The obscure feeling of perfectability that he has causes man to think he is still far from his goal when he has in fact attained it but the light of reason is not bright enough for him. What he finds easy he thinks bad, and thus he strains from the bad to the good and from the good to a kind of bad that he considers better than good. Good taste is either that which agrees with my taste or that which subjects itself to the rule of reason. From this we can see how useful it is to employ reason in seeking out the laws of taste.

5.71 'How's it going?' a blind man asked a cripple. 'As you see,' the cripple replied.

5.76 With a pen in my hand I have successfully stormed bulwarks from which others armed with sword and excommunciation have been repulsed.

5.79 Even if they were of use for nothing else, the poets of antiquity at least enable us here and there to get to know the opinions of the common people . . . For our folksongs are often full of a mythology known to no one but the fool who made the folksong.

5.93 What effect must it have on a nation if it learns no foreign languages? Probably much the same as that which a total withdrawal from all society has on an individual.

6.2 If you want to know what other people think about something that concerns you, you have only to reflect on what you would think of them under the same circumstances. You should regard no one as morally superior to you on this point, and no one as more simple. More often than we think, people notice things we believe we have artfully concealed from them. Of this remark more than half is true, and that is saying a lot of a maxim composed in one's thirtieth year.

6.5 What a work could be written on Shakespeare, Hogarth and Garrick! There is something similar in the genius of all three: intuitive knowledge of men of every class made comprehensible through words, engraving tool and gesture respectively.

6.16 The frogs were much happier under King Log than they were under King Stork.

6.23 To write with sensibility requires more than tears and moonlight.

6.24 Something witty can be said against anything and for anything. A witty man could, of course, say something against this assertion that world perhpas make me regret it.

6.29 Perhpas a dog just before it goes to sleep or a drunken elephant has ideas that would not be unworthy of a Master of Philosophy. But such ideas are useless to them, and their all too sensitive sensual apparatus soon expunges them.

6.32 The first rule with novels as well as plays is to regard the various characters as though they were pieces in a game of chess and not seek to win one's game by changing the laws that govern these pieces - not move a knight like a pawn, etc. Secondly, to define these characters exactly and not render them inactive in order to reach one's final goal but to win by allowing them to be what they are. To do otherwise really means wanting to work miracles, which are always unnatural.

6.34 Long before we could explain the common phenomena of the physical world we ventured to explain them through the agency of spirits. Now we know better how they are linked together we explain one phenomenon by means of another; but we nonetheless still have two spirits left to us, a god and a soul. The soul is thus even now, as it were, the ghost that haunts our body's fragile frame. But is this adequate even for our limited reason: must that which, in our opinion, cannot be brought about by the things we know be brought about by things other than those we know? This is not only a false but a tasteless process of reasoning. I am altogether convinced that we know precisely nothing of that which is comprehensible to us, and how much more may there not be that the fibres of our brain cannot picture? What most becomes us in philosophy, and especially in psychology, is modesty and circumspection. What is matter as the psychologist thinks of it? Perhaps nothng of the sort exists in nature; he kills matter and afterwards says it is dead.

6.40 I believe that the source of most human misery lies in softness and indolence. The nation with the greatest vibrancy has always been also the freest and happiest. Indolence takes no revenge but accepts every kind of affront and every kind of oppression.

6.41 The metaphor is much more subtle than its inventor, and so are many things. Everything has its depth. He who has eyes sees all in everything.

6.42 Just as a deaf-mute can learn languages and how to read, so we too can do things whose compass we do not know and accomplish designs we are unaware of. He is a witness for a sense he himself does not have.

6.44 The Greeks possessed a knowledge of human nature we seem hardly able to attain to without passing through the strengthening hibernation of a new barbarism.

6.53 Doubt must be no more than vigilance, otherwise it can become dangerous.

6.57 Wine is accredited only with the misdeeds it induces: what is forgotten is the hundreds of good deeds of which it is also the cause. Wine excites to action: to good actions in the good, to bad in the bad.

6.59 Man becomes a sophist and over-acute whenever he lacks true and thorough knowledge; consequently everyone must do so when it comes to the immortality of the soul and life after death. Here we are all superficial. Materialism is the asymptote of psychology.

6.69 A clever child brought up with a foolish one can itself become foolish. Man is so perfectible and corruptible he can become a fool through good sense.

6.71 There are people of an innocuous disposition who are at the same time vain, who speak constantly of their honesty and pursue it almost like a profession, and who know how to whine about their merits with such boastful modesty one loses all patience with these perpetually importunate creditors.

6.72 If what I once read is true, that no one dies without first having said something of sense, then M. has produced one of the immortals.

6.74 To excuse one's own failings as being only human nature is, provided one has meant well, every writer's first duty to himself.

6.76 He stood there looking as sad as a dead bird's bird bath.

6.78 All impartiality is artificial. Man is always partial and is quite right to be. Even impartiality is partial. He was of the party of the impartial.

6.79 That which we are able to judge with our feelings is very little and simple; everything else is all prejudice and complaisance.

6.81 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. . .

6.87 Amplify the following proposition: Just as the performance of the vilest and most wicked deeds requires spirit and talent, so even the greatest demand a certain insensitivity which under other circumstances we would call stupidity.

6.88 Much can be inferred about a man from his mistress: in her one beholds his weaknesses and his dreams . . .

6.95 I again commend dreams; we live and experience in dreams as well as we do when awake . . . The dream is a life which, combined with the rest of our life, constitutes what we call human life. Dreams merge gradually into our waking state: one cannot say where a man's waking state begins.

6.98 In the matter of seeing without light, it is noteworthy that what we see if we close our eyes in the dark can become the beginnings of dreams, only what follows is quite different according to whether we then sleep or stay in possession of our waking reason. I should like to know whether animals' dreams are stupider than the animals are when awake: if so, they possess a degree of reason.

6.107 This incomprehensible being we are, and which would appear even more incomprehensible to us if we could come even closer to it, we must not expct to find inscribed on a countenance.

6.108 The detection of small errors has always been the property of minds elevated little or not at all above the mediocre; notably elevated minds remain silent or say something only in criticism of the whole, while the great spirits refrain from censuring and only create.

6.115 Sometimes we make in the morning a statement that afterwards dogs us for the rest of the day: thus on 28 February 1778 I said once almost every quarter of an hour: Law is a bottomless pit.

6.118 The infirm often possess accomplishments which a man of sound constitution is either incapable of or lacks the resolution to acquire.

6.119 Two people, one of whom wanted to convert the other and had failed to do so, unite together to convert me, and will have a hard job to do so.

6.122 Whenever cultivated men of the world say God knows! it is always a sure sign that in addition to Almighty God they know an almighty man who also knows.

6.125 Janet Macleod is the name of a girl who for many years on end ate nothing . . . People who except for a couple of magazine-crumbs have taken no mental food for ten years exist even among professors - it is, in fact, not at all uncommon.

6.126 Something may be made even of dogs if they are brought up properly, only you must have them associate, not with mature people, but with children: thus they will become human. This is a confirmation of my proposition that children should always be attached to people who are only a little wiser than they themselves are.

6.130 That which creates the polymath is often not a knowledge of many things but a happy relationship between his abilities and his taste by virtue of which the latter always approves of what the former produeces

136 First there is a time when we believe everything without reasons; then for a short time we believe but with discrimination; then we believe nothing at all; and then we again believe everything and go on to specify our reasons for believing everything.

6.145 It is incontestible that male beauty has not yet been sufficiently depicted by the hands that alone could have depicted it, namely female hands. I am always pleased to hear of a new poetess: provided she has not modelled her work on poems written by men, what discoveries could await us!

6.154 That people who read so astonishingly should often be such bad thinkers may likewise have its origin in the constitution of our brain. It is certainly not a matter of indifference whether I learn something without effort or finally arrive at it myself through my system of thought. In the latter case everything has roots, in the former it is merely superficial.

6.159 Before you damn to Hell any great criminal whose story you have read, just give thanks to benevolent Heaven that it did not place you, with your fair and honest face, at the commencement of such a succession of circumstances.

6.160 You believe I run after the strange because I do not know the beautiful; no, it is because you do not know the beautiful that I seek the strange.

6.163 (Lion) . . . could from his 16th year no longer convince himself that Christ was the son of God, and this became so commonplace a thing to him and grew to be so much a part of him as he grew that such a conviction was no longer so much as thinkable. His only regret was that Christ himself had not written a book . . .