The Art of Having Something to Say 11: More Lichtenberg

"Dreams, the impartial outcome of our entire being. . ." And Other Aphorisms

7.1 To make known the weaknesses of the great is a kind of duty: in doing so one comforts thousands without doing the great any harm. D'Alembert's letter on Rousseau in the Mercure de France, September 1779, deserves to be better known.

*7.3 Herr 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.

7.7 What is called an acute knowledge of human nature is mostly nothing but the observer's own weaknesses reflected back from others.

7.10 Men who know 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.

7.17 People find it harder to believe in miracles than in traditions of miracles, and many a Turk, Jew etc., who will now let himself be killed for his tradition would have remained very calm and composed had he been witness to the miracle when it happened . . .

7.21 The heroes of the poets of antiquity are very different from those in, e.g., Milton. They are brave, shrewd and wise, but seldom amiable or compassionate in the sense of our morality. Milton took his from the Bible. Does our Christian morality perhaps have its origin in a certain weakness, in a Jewish cowardice, while the other is founded on strength? Universal acceptability is perhaps only a fair chimera and something that will never be attained.

7.24 To make man as religion wants him to be resembles the undertaking of the Stoics: it is only another grade of the impossible.

7.27 How happily many a man would live if he concerned himself with other people's affairs as little as he does with his own.

7.31 A great genius will seldom make his discoveries on paths frequented by others. When he discovers things he usually also discovers the path to discovery.

*7.32 Popular presentation is today all too oten that which puts the mob in a position to talk of something without understanding it.

7.33 The plain style of writing is to be recommended if only because no honest man takes elaborate pains over what he says.

7.40 If someone left 100,000 Louis d'or to the greatest rogue in Germany, how many claimants there would be to the legacy!

*8.2 Among those things that have most made me smile is the idea entertained by certain missionaries of baptizing a whole yardful of proselytes with a fire-engine . . .

8.3 There is a great difference between believing something and being unable to believe its opposite. I can very often believe something without being able to prove it, just as I do not believe something without being able to refute it. The stance I adopt will be determined not by strict proof but by preponderance of evidence.

8.5 I believe the surest way of promoting the progress of mankind would be through the civilizing of the natural talents of the barbarian (who stands between the savage and the civilized man) by means of philosophy communicated by the polished reason of the civilized man. If the savage and the barbarian should ever vanish from the world it will be all up with us.

8.9 There are truths which go around so dressed up you would take them for lies, but which are pure truths nonetheless.

8.11 An imaginary incapacity can with timid people long play the role of a real one, in works of the head just as much as of the body.

*8.12 Because people have such a strong tendency to put things off and take things slowly, so that what ought to happen at five in the morning commonly takes place at six, you can count for certain on retaining the upper hand in any matter if you do everything without the slightest delay.

8.21 It is a great trick of oratory sometimes merely to persuade people when you could have convinced them; then they will ofen think they have been convinced when in fact all you are able to do is merely persuade them.

8.22 Nothing arouses the curiosity of youth more than fragments of useful knowledge interwoven into pleasing poetry. Thomson's Seasons is a masterpiece in this, and must have awoken a love of nature in many an Englishman.

8.24 One begets the idea, another is godfather at its baptism, the third begets children by it, the fourth visits it on its deathbed, and the fifth buries it.

8.25 Not only did he not believe in ghosts, he wasn't even aftraid of them.

8.32 Our false philosphy is incorporated in our entire language; we can, so to speak, not reason without reasoning falsely. We fail, to consider that speaking, regardless of what, is a philosophy . . . Our whole philosophy is rectification of colloquial linguistic usage, thus rectification of a philosophy, and indeed of the most universal and general . . .

8.34 One cannot too often reflect that the existence of a God, the immortality of the soul, and the like are things merely conceivable, not perceptible. They are combinations of ideas, thought-games, to which nothing objective needs to correspond. . . .

8.35 To say we perceive external objects is contradictory; it is impossible for man to go outside himself. When we believe we are seeing objects we are seeing only ourselves. We can really perceive nothing in the world except ourselves and the changes that take place in us. It is likewise impossible for us to feel for others, as it is customary to say we do; we feel only for ourselves. The proposition sounds a harsh one, but it is not when it is correctly understood. We love neither father, nor mother, nor wife, nor child: what we love are the pleasant sensations they produce in us . . . Nothing else is at all possible, and he who denies this proposition cannot have understood it . . .

*8.36 Rational free-spirits are the light brigade who go on ahead and reconnoitre the ground which they heavy brigade of the orthodox will eventually occupy.

8.37 The ass seems to me like the horse translated into Dutch.

8.38 What am I? What shall I do? What can I believe and hope for? Eveything in philosphy can be reduced to this . . .

9.3 Where we experience no localized sensation, where we do not actually feel an impression on our organs of sense, we cannot reduce anything to bodily effects. If we were unable to close our eyes we would not know whether we see with our head or with our belly . . .

9.4 If the New Testament faithfully transmits the precepts of the Christian religion then the Catholic religion is hardly Christian . . . The Catholic religion received its present form during ages of the grossest ignorance; it is impossible for a man again permitted to employ his reason to continue to adhere to it - it can be maintained only by fire and sword.

*10.9 One use of dreams is that, unprejudiced by our often forced and artificial reflections, they represent the impartial outcome of our entire being. This thought deserves to be taken very much to heart.

10.20 Alas, he exclaimed when things went wrong, if only I had done something pleasantly wicked this morning I would at least know why I am suffering now!

*10.24 When in a dream I dispute with someone and he contradicts and instructs me it is I who am instructing myself, that is to say reflecting. This reflection thus presents itself in the form of conversation. Can we be surprised, therefore, if earlier people expressed their thoughts about the serpent (as with Eve) with: the serpent spoke to me. The Lord spoke to me. My spirit spoke to me. Since we do not know where we think, we can remove our thoughts to wherever we wish. Just as we can speak so that he who hears us believes the voice is coming from a third person, so we can think, too, as though we were being spoken to. Genius Sokratis, etc. What an astonishing amount may we not yet learn from dreams.



*10.30 The true function of the writer in relation to mankind is continually to say what most men think or feel without realizing it. Mediocre writers say only what everyone would have said . . .

10.33 Enlightenment in all classes of society really consists in correctly grasping what our essential needs are.

10.34 Overwiseness is one of the most contemptible kinds of unwisdom.

10.36 Relative to the subject an idea is sensation, to the immediate object perception.

10.37 Revelation does not make me understand a thing, it makes me understand it when it is founded on authority. But what authority can constrain me to believe something that contradicts my reason? Only the word of God. But do we possess any word of God that stands outside reason? Cerainly not. For it is men who have said that the Bible is the word of God, and men can know no word of God other than reason.

10.40 Can it be that the evil in the world is in general of more use than the good?

10.41 Many are obscurely aware of how mechanical man is in all his so-called acts of free will . . . In regard to the body we are quite obviously slaves . . . What if belief we are acting freely consists merely in the feeling that now the clock is working properly?

10.45 In the eyes of God there are only rules, strictly speaking only one rule with no exceptions. Because we do not know this supreme rule we construct general rules which are not rules at all; it could well be possible, indeed, that what we call rules could even for finite beings constitute exceptions.

10.52 Use, use your powers: what now costs you effort will in the end become mechanical.

10.56 This is still the soft reverberation of a heavy thunderclap of superstition (conscience, etc.).

*10.60 This entire doctrine is worthless except as a subject of dispute.

10.63 That is the weather-side of my moral constitution: I can withstand something on that side.

10.65 A great speech is easy to learn by heart and a great poem even easier. How hard it would be to memorize as many words linked together senselessly, or a speech in a foreign tongue! Sense and understanding thus come to the aid of memory. Sense is order and order is in the last resort conformity with our nature. When we speak rationally we are only speaking in accordance with the nature of our being. That is why to annex something to our memory we always seek to introduce sense or some other kind of order into it. That is why we devise genera and species in the case of plants and animals. The hypotheses we make belong here too: we are obliged to have them because otherwise we would be unable to retain things . . . The question is, however, whether everything is legible to us. Certainly experiment and reflection enable us to introduce a significance into what is not legible, either to us or at all: thus we see faces or landscapes in the sand, though they are certainly not there. The introduction of symmetries belongs here too, silhouettes in inkblots, etc. Likewise the gradation we establish in the order of creatures: all this is not in the things but in us. In general we cannot remember too often that when we observe nature, and especially the ordering of nature, it is always ourselves alone we are observing.

10.77 I believe that, just as the adherents of Herr Kant always accuse their opponents of not understanding him, so there are many who believe Herr Kant is right because they do understand him. His mode of exposition is novel and differs greatly from the usual one, and once we have finally succeeded in understanding it there is a great temptation to regard it as true, especially as he has so many zealous adherents; we ought always to remember, however, that the fact that we understand it is in fact no reason for regarding it as true. I believe that delight at having understood a very abstract and obscure system leads most people to believe in the truth of what it demonstrates.

*10.82 I have gone down the road to science in the way dogs go for a walk with their masters, backwards and forwards along it a hundred times, and when I arrived I was tired.

10.86 Such people do not really defend Christianity, but they do let Christianity defend them.

10.87 He had learned to play a couple of little pieces on the keyboard of metaphysics.

10.92 Most propagaors of a faith defend their propositions, not because they are convinced of their truth, but because they once asserted they were true.

10.98 It always saddens me when a man of talent dies, for the earth has more need of such men than Heaven does.

*10.100 To express truly what one has truly felt - that is to say with those little expressive traits that testify one is speaking of one's own experience - is what really makes the great writer: ordinary writers always avail themselves of phrases and expressions that are nothing but clothes from the second-hand market.

10.101 Boorishness, too, has its geniuses, and who will call nature to account for having proclaimed this gift to its possessor through the flattering feeling of strength and superiority and self-contentment? The ways of Heaven are dark and devious and its comforts manifold.

10.103 The idea we have of a soul has much in common with that of a magnet under the earth. It is merely an image. To picture everything in such forms as this is an inborn inventive faculty in man.

10.107 The course of the seasons is a clock in which a cuckoo goes 'cuckoo' when spring arrives.

10.118 I have long thought that philosophy will yet eat up itself. - Metaphysics has eaten up part of itself already.

*10.119 Apologizing for mistakes is all very well as far as it goes, but it usually contributes as little towards correcting one's blunder as when at skittles you try to assist the ball by moving your head, shoulders, arms and legs after it has left your hand: it is more a desire to influence than actual influence.

10.122 I have made it my rule that the rising sun should never find me in bed so long as I am well. This rule cost me nothing but the making of it, for my attitude towards laws I have imposed upon myself has always been never to impose them until I would find it almost impossible to transgress them.

10.129 Practical reason or the moral sense: the latter expression will make it clearer to many what one means by the former.

10.133 It is astonishing how much the word infinitely is misused: everything is infinitely more beautiful, infinitely better, etc. The concept must have something pleasing about it, or its misuse could not have become so general.

10.139 Our forefathers' healthy appetite for food seems now to have been transformed into a not so healthy appetite for reading: and as the Spaniards formerly came running up to watch the Germans eat, so foreigners now come to watch us study.

10.144 Presupposing we do not regard ourselves as an object of observation like a prepared specimen but always as the sum of what we now are, we are lost if we acquire too much time for reflecting on ourselves. We become aware of so much that is dismal and wretched that at the sight of it all desire to organize it or hold it together departs from us.

10.147 I believe that, in comparison with an Englishman, the German stifles many things with his reason, which is something that ought really never to happen. Ther German, for example, refrains from laughing because he knows laughter world be improper on many occasions on which it has not so much as occurred to the Englishman to laugh at all.

10.152 All we really have are transplanters of novels and comedies. Few are raised from seed.

*10.153 You should never look for genuine Christian convictions in a man who makes a parade of his piety.

10.154 In regard to K's taunts and jibes against me and others my greatest comfort, or rather my sweetest revenge, is the perfect conviction that a great and good man would never be capable of them.

10.155 'Many are less fortunate than you' may not be a roof to live under, but it will serve to retire beneath in the event of a shower.

10.159 Many people regard as divine that which has no rational sense in it. Pleasure in contemplating useless algebraic equations one has made up oneself belong in this class.

10.160 The principle of sufficient reason is, as a purely logical principle, a necessary law of thought, and to this extent it admits of no dispute; whether it is an objective, real, metaphysical principle is, however, another question.

10.163 Nature has bestowed on the animals sufficient intelligence for them to take care of their self-preservation. They all know very well what to do when it comes to this important matter. Vaillant gives some very good examples of it in the way animals behave at the approach of lions. Nature has almost instinctively armed even man against the fear of death - with the belief in immortality.

10.166 You can make a good living from soothsaying but not from truth-saying.

*10.170 S. seldom does wrong, but what he does he usually does at the wrong time.

*10.174 Two people do not love one another but each would like to make the other love him or her to the point of dying of love or committing suicide: these two write one another letters. The result could be very amusing.

*10.175 Those who first invented the forgiveness of sins through formulas in Latin are guilty of the greatest act of corruption there has ever been.

10.176 There is something quite natural in the fact that we admire great warriors, as there is in our thirst for conquest: the former corresponds to beauty and bodily strength, the latter to comfort and well-being. It will thus never be possible to philosophize these things out of the world.

10.177 I regard reviews as a kind of childhood illness to which newborn books are subject to a greater or less degree. There are instances of the soundest dying of them, while the feeble often come through. Many don't catch them at all. Attempts have often been made to ward them off with the aid of the amulets of prefaces and dedications, or even to inoculate them with self-criticisms, but this doesn't always work.

*10.178 One of the most difficult arts for man to acquire is surely the art of acquiring courage. Those who lack it find it most readily under the powerful protection of one who does possess it and who can then aid us if all else fails. Since, however, there is so much affliction in the world against which the courage of no human creature can serve to offer sufficient comfort to the weaker, religion offers an excellent substitute. Religion is really the art of acquiring for oneself comfort and courage in affliction, and the strength to work against it, through thoughts of God and by no other means. I have known people to whom their good fortune was their God. They believed in their good fortune and their belief gave them courage. Courage gave them good fortune and good fortune gave them courage. It is a great loss for a man if he loses his faith in a wise being who directs the world. I believe this is an inevitable consequence of all study of philosophy and of nature. One does not lose belief in a God, to be sure, but it is no longer the benevolent God of our childhood; it is a being whose ways are not our ways and whose thoughts are not our thoughts, and this is not especially helpful to the helpless.

10.184 In addition to time there exists another means of bringing about great changes, and that is - force. When the former moves too slowly the latter often anticipates it.

10.186 The art of making men dissatisfied with their fate so much practised nowadays. Oh if only we could return to the age of the Patriachs . . . or go to happy Tahiti, where . . . there is perfect human equality and you have the right to eat your enemies and to be eaten by them.

10.193 Even the mistakes we so frequently make are useful in that in the end they accustom us to believing that everything may be different from what we imagine it to be. This experience too can, like the seeking after causes, be generalized, so that at last we are bound to arrive at the philosophy which denies even the necessity of the principii contradictionis.

10.195 It is truly astonishing that we have erected our belief in God upon vague ideas of causation. We know nothing of Him, and can know nothing, for to conclude that the world must have a creator is never anything but anthropomorphism.

10.196 His entire strength lay in being able to give passable expression to what other people had thought.

10.197 We read so much about genius nowadays everyone believes he is one. The man who early on regards himself as a genius is lost.

10.200 Without imagination man would really be nothng at all, for similarity of particulars is in fact the only thing that leads us to scienfitic knowledge: it is only through similarities that we are able to arrange and retain. The similarities do not reside in the things: in the eyes of God there are no similarities. From which, to be sure, the conclusion must follow that the greater the understanding the more deficient the imagination. . .

10.201 A golden rule: We must judge men, not by their opinions, but by what these opinions make of them. . .

10.211 I watch over the young lady's virtue as though it were my own, says an old governess.

10.213 That God, or whatever it is, has induced man to propagate himself by making him enjoy coition must also be borne in mind in reflceting on Kant's highest principle of morality.

10.222 We are unwilling to give up false opinions we have conceived of people once we consider ourselves justified in saying they are based on a subtle application of our knowledge of mankind and believe that such insight into the heart of another is possible only to certain initiates. - There are consequently few branches of human knowledge in which a little learning can do more harm than in this branch.

10.223 People understand loyalty to an upright man much better than they do loyalty to even the best statutes. . .

*10.227 Formerly when I got annoyed it was with a feeling or strength; now it is with a feeling of passive anxiety.

10.238 Is the situation so uncommon, then, in which philosophy forbids one to philosophize?

10.241 France is in fermentation: whether the product will be wine or vinegar is as yet uncertain.

10.243 Wherever I experience a new thought, a new theory, always to ask: Is this really as new as you believe it is? This is also in general the best way of remembering never to be amazed at anything in the world (nil admirari).

10.249 Man is a masterpiece of creation if for no other reason than that, all the weight of evidence for determinism notwithstanding, he believes he has free will.

10.263 Do not say hypothesis, and even less theory: say way of thinking.

11.2 Even the best laws can only be respected and feared, not loved. Good rulers are respected, feared and loved. What mighty sources of happiness for a nation good rulers are!

11.3 The grander and more far-reaching the project of which a revolution is a part, the more suffering the revolution will inflict upon those involved in it: for not everyone is capable of employing his reason for the strengthening of his patience even when he has the whole design in view, and these will be the fewer the more uncertain it is whether they will enjoy the fruits. But it is precisely this shortsightedness that prevents even the wisest governments from achieving their great goals by the gentle paths they rightly prusue: for, since it is a natural duty always to choose only what we think good, it is impossible to embark upon a course designed to improve the world but which must in the meantime make millions unhappy. Man is here to cultivate only the surface of the earth: the cultivation and repair that extend further into the depths are reserved by nature for herself. This cultivation has not been entrusted to man. He cannot cause earthquakes that overturn cities, and if he could he would certainly produce them in the wrong place. I am much inclined to believe that the same applies to our -archies and -crasies. What the plough and the axe can do, that we can and must do, but not what pertains to the earthquake, the flood or the hurricane, though this is probably, indeed certainly, just as useful and necessary.

11.4 If a higher being were to tell us how the world came into existence I would like to know whether we would be in a position to understand. I believe not. There would be hardly any mention of the act of coming into existence, for that is mere anthropomorphism. It may even be that outside of our own minds there is nothing at all corresponding to our concept of coming into existence once it is applied, not to relations between things, but to objects in themselves.

11.8 I am extraordinarily susceptible to loud noises, but they lose all their disagreeableness as soon as they are connected with some rational objective.

11.9 I have frequently been censured for errors I have committed which those who have censured me had not the energy or the wit to commit themselves.

*11.15 What is very strange and unusual seldom remains unexplained for long. The inexplicable is usually no longer strange and unusual and perhaps never has been.

11.20 I can never see anything wrong with theorizing: it is an impulse of the soul that can prove useful to us as soon as we have accumulated sufficient experience. Thus all the follies of theorizing we at present commit could be impulses that will find their application only in the future.

11.25 It is impossible to see any limit to the distance anthropomorphism can extend, the word taken in its largest compass. People revenge themselves on the dead; bones are exhumed and dishonoured; we take pity on inanimate objects - thus someone once commiserated with a clock when it stopped because of the cold. This transference of our feelings to others is to be found everywhere, and in such manifold forms it is not always easy to identify it. Perhaps the entire pronoun other originates in this way.

11.26 Since in dreams we so often take our own objections for those of another, e.g. when we are disputing with someone, I am only surprised we do not frequently do so when awake. The condition of wakefulness thus seems to lie chiefly in our making a sharp and conventional distinction between in us and outside us.

11.28 In the weak, lack of strength to defend oneself passes over into complaining. This can be observed in children; but the best always stay obstinately and defiantly silent.

11.48 It is in the gift for employing all the vicissitudes of life to one's own advantage and to that of one's craft that a large part of genuis consists.

11.53 The celebrated wit Chamfort used to say: I have three kinds of friends: those who love me, those who pay no attention to me, and those who detest me. Very true!

11.57 It is always dangerous times when men have a lively awareness of their own importance and of what they have the power to do. It is always a good thing for them to slumber a little in regard to their political rights, powers and possibilities, just as horses ought not to employ their strength on every possible occasion.

11.62 To establish liberty and equality as many people now think of them would mean producing an eleventh commandment through which the other ten would be abolished.

11.74 The only fault one can impute to genuinely fine writings is that they are usually the cause of very many bad or mediocre ones.

11.83. Would it not be a good thing if in say the year 1800 we were to assume that theology is concluded and forbid theologians to make any further discoveries?

11.85 The Socratic method intensified - I mean torture.

11.92 I have had all last year's newspapers bound up together, and the effect of reading them in indescribable: 50 parts false hopes, 47 parts false prophecies and three parts truth. This reading has lowered my opinion of this year's papers very greatly, for I reflect: what the latter are the former were also.

11.98 It is so very modern to place a funeral urn on top a grave while the body rots in a box underneath. And this funeral urn is in turn a mere symbol of a funeral urn: it is merely the tombstone of a funeral urn.

11.104 We ought not to lie down to sleep without being able to say we have learned something that day. By this I do not mean, for instance, a word we didn't know before; such a thing is nothing; but if anyone wants to do it I have nothing against it, not just before blowing out the light in any event. No, what I mean by learning is the advancement of our scientific or otherwise useful knowledge; the rectification of an error in which we have long been involved; the acquisition of certainty in many things about which we were for long uncertain and of a clear conception of that which was unclear to us; a knowledge of important truths, etc. What makes this endeavour useful is that we cannot take care of the matter quickly just before blowing out the light: our activities throughout the whole day have to be directed towards it. Even the will to fulfil such resolutions is important: I mean here the constant endeavour to satisfy the requirement.

12.5 The Greeks did not ruin the best years of their youth by learning dead languages; instead they learned the languages they had need of, and did so through the things described and not, as we do in countless instances, the things described through the words. Plutarch was already getting on when he started to learn Latin.

12.6 The windows of the Englightenment are subject to a heavy window tax in Germany.

12.9 I have long been conviced that in families which consist, for example, of a husband and wife, four to eight children, a chambermaid, a couple of maidservants, a couple of footmen, a coachman, etc., and likewise in smaller families, especially when a couple of elderly aunts are at any rate tolerated in it as well, affairs are conducted precisely as, mutatis mutandis, they are in the greatest states: here too there are agreements, peace treaties, wars, changes of ministry, lettres de cachet, Reformations, revolutions, etc. . . .

12.12 A somewhat pert philosopher - Hamlet, Prince of Denmark, I think - said there were more things in Heaven and earth than could be found in our compendia. If the simple fellow, who as is well known was not in his right mind, was with this phrase jeering at our compendia of physics, we may cheerfully reply to him: very good, but on the other hand there are more things in our compendia than can be found in either Heaven or earth.

12.22 He didn't want to corrupt, but he did corrupt. It is very sad that the endeavour to diminish the evil with which man is plagued only serves to augment it. As a rule it seems we are better acquainted with the force than we are with the material to which it is applied.

12.24 Everything we as men are compelled to recognize as real really is real for men. For as soon as it is no longer permitted to conclude that what natural constraint tells us is actual is in fact actual any firm principle ceases to be conceivable. One thing is then as uncertain as another. He to whom the proof of the existence of a supreme being from nature (the cosmological proof) is compelling, let him accept it; likewise he who finds the theorietical or the moral proof convincing. Even those who have racked their brains to discover new proofs have perhaps been induced to do so by a compulsion they could not quite explain to themselves. Instead of giving us their new proofs they should have explained to us the motivation that constrained them to search for them, provided it was not merely fear of consistories or governments.

12.29 Kant says somewhere: Reason is rather polemical than dogmatic.

12.33 I now do really believe that the question whether objects outside of us possess objective reality fails to make rational sense. We are compelled by our nature to say of certain objects of our perception that they are located outside of us, we cannot do otherwise . . . The question is almost as foolish as the question whether the colour blue is really blue. We cannot possilby transcend the question . . .

12.34 Of all the inventions of man I doubt whether any was more easily accomplished than that of a Heaven.

12.36 Are we too not a cosmic system, and one we know better, or at least ought to know better, than we do the heavenly firmament?

12.39 When he philosophizes he usually throws a pleasant moonlight over the objects of his philosophizing which is pleasing as a whole but fails to display clearly one single object.

12.45 This was the handle by which you had to grip him if you wanted to pour him out: if you gripped him anywhere else you burned your fingers.

12.46 I am afraid that the excessively careful education we provide is cultivating dwarf fruit.

12.49 What most clearly characterizes true freedom and its true employment is its misemployment.

12.50 Reason now gazes above the realm of the dark but warm feeling as the Alpine peaks do above the clouds. They behold the sun more clearly and distinctly, but they are cold and unfruitful . . .

10.52 Motto: to desire to discover the truth is meritorious, even if we go astray on the way.

12.57 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?

12.61 If need is the mother of industriousness or of invention, it is a question who the father is, or the grandmother, or who the mother of need is.

12.65 If need is the mother of invention, then the war that begot the need is no doubt the grandfather of invention . . .

*12.66 Diminution of one's needs is something that certainly ought to be inculcated youth. 'The fewer needs one has the happier one is' is an old but much-neglected truth.

12.77 The question is still whether in the last resort the spirit of contradiction is not on the whole of greater utility than unity and agreement.

12.82 At his birth everyone receives a ticket in the great lottery of discovery in which the biggest prize had certainly not yet been drawn by the end of the year 1798.

12.97 Is our conception of God anything more than personified incomprehensibility?

12.98 I believe that man is in the last resort so free a being that his right to be what he beleves himself to be cannot be contested.