The Waste Books Quotes

“Nothing is more conductive to peace of mind than not having any opinions at all.”
― Georg Christoph Lichtenberg, The Waste Books

“The most dangerous of all falsehoods is a slightly distorted truth.”
― Georg Christoph Lichtenberg, The Waste Books

“A book is a mirror: if an ape looks into it an apostle is hardly likely to look out.”
― Georg Christoph Lichtenberg, Sudelbücher.

“There are very many people who read simply to prevent themselves from thinking.”
― Georg Christoph Lichtenberg, The Waste Books

“A person reveals his character by nothing so clearly as the joke he resents.”
― Georg Christoph Lichtenberg, The Waste Books

“To do just the opposite is also a form of imitation.”
― Georg Christoph Lichtenberg, The Waste Books

“When a book and a head collide and a hollow sound is heard, must it always have come from the book?”
― Georg Christoph Lichtenberg, The Waste Books

“Whenever he composes a critical review, I have been told, he gets an enormous erection.”
― Georg Christoph Lichtenberg, The Waste Books

“I forget most of what I read, just as I do most of what I have eaten, but I know that both contribute no less to the conservation of my mind and my body on that account.”
― Georg Christoph Lichtenberg, The Waste Books

“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.”
― Georg Christoph Lichtenberg, The Waste Books

“You can make a good living from soothsaying but not from truthsaying”
― Georg Christoph Lichtenberg, The Waste Books

“If countries were named after the words you first hear when you go there, England would have to be called "Damn It".”
― Georg Christoph Lichtenberg, Aphorisms

“Just as there are polysyllabic words that say very little, so there are also monosyllabic words of infinite meaning.”
― Georg Christoph Lichtenberg, The Waste Books

“To make clever people believe we are what we are not is in most instances harder than really to become what we want to seem to be.”
― Georg Christoph Lichtenberg, The Waste Books

“In his Comedy, Dante Alighieri names Virgil, with many tokens of respect, as his teacher, and yet as Herr Meinhard remarks, makes such ill use of him: clear proof that even in the days of Dante one praised the ancients without knowing why. This respect for poets one does not understand and yet wishes to equal is the source of the bad writing in our literature.”
― Georg Christoph Lichtenberg, The Waste Books

“Every condition of the soul has its own sign and expression...So you will see how hard it is to seem original without being so.”
― Georg Christoph Lichtenberg, The Waste Books

“Nothing makes one old so quickly as the ever-present thought that one is growing older”
― Georg Christoph Lichtenberg, The Waste Books

“We say that someone occupies an official position, whereas it is the official position that occupies him.”
― Georg Christoph Lichtenberg, The Waste Books

“It makes a great difference by what path we come to a knowledge of certain things. If we begin in our youth with metaphysics and religion we can easily proceed along a series of rational conclusions that will lead us to the immortality of the soul. Not every other path will lead to this, at least not quite so easily.”
― Georg Christoph Lichtenberg, The Waste Books

“It requires no especially great talent to write in such a way that another will be very hard put to it to understand what you have written”
― Georg Christoph Lichtenberg, The Waste Books

“Nothing is more inimical to the progress of science than the belief that we know what we do not yet know.”
― Georg Christoph Lichtenberg, The Waste Books

“He who is enamoured of himself will at least have the advantage of being inconvenienced by few rivals.”
― Georg Christoph Lichtenberg, The Waste Books

“For the loss of those we have loved there is no alleviation but time and carefully and rationally chosen diversions such as will not cause our heart to reproach us.”
― Georg Christoph Lichtenberg, The Waste Books

“Nowadays three witty turns of phrase and a lie make a writer.”
― Georg Christoph Lichtenberg, The Waste Books

“There are people who possess not so much genius as a certain talent for perceiving the desires of the century, or even of the decade, before it has done so itself.”
― Georg Christoph Lichtenberg, The Waste Books

“La escritura es excelente para despertar el sistema que dormita en cada hombre; cualquiera que haya escrito habrá notado que al escribir siempre se despierta algo que hasta entonces conocíamos de un modo impreciso y que sin embargo yacía en nosotros.”
― Georg Christoph Lichtenberg, Aphorisms

“El primer libro que habría que prohibir en el mundo sería un catálogo de libros prohibidos.”
― Georg Christoph Lichtenberg, Aphorisms

“Las reglas de la gramática son meras convenciones humanas; por eso cuando el diablo se le aparece a los poseídos habla un mal latín.”
― Georg Christoph Lichtenberg, Aphorisms

“Aquello tuvo el efecto que por lo general tienen los buenos libros. Hizo más tontos a los tontos, más listos a los listos y los miles restantes quedaron ilesos.”
― Georg Christoph Lichtenberg, Aphorisms

“Cuando se empieza a ver todo en todo, la manera de expresarse suele volverse más oscura. Se empieza a hablar con lengua de ángel […].”
― Georg Christoph Lichtenberg, Aphorisms