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The Lower Classes Of Men, Though They Do Not Think It Worthwhile To Record What They Perceive, Nevertheless Perceive Everything That Is Worth Noting; The Difference Between Them And A Man Of Learning Often Consists In Nothing More Than The Latter's Facility For Expression.

-Georg C. Lichtenberg

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The Lower Classes Of

Georg C. Lichtenberg

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The Lower Classes Of Men, Though They Do Not Think It Worthwhile To Record What They Perceive, Nevertheless Perceive Everything That Is Worth Noting; The Difference Between Them And A Man Of Learning Often Consists In Nothing More Than The Latter's Facility For Expression.

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More From Georg C. Lichtenberg

The Fruits Of Philosophy Are The Important Thing, Not The Philosophy Itself. When We Ask The Time, We Don't Want To Know How Watches Are Made.

There Can Hardly Be A Stranger Commodity In The World Than Books. Printed By People Who Don't Understand Them; Sold By People Who Don't Understand Them; Bound, Criticized And Read By People Who Don't Understand Them; And Now Even Written By People Who Don't Understand Them.

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.

The Thoughts Written On The Walls Of Madhouses By Their Inmates Might Be Worth Publicizing.

Men Still Have To Be Governed By Deception.

He Who Knows Himself Properly Can Very Soon Learn To Know All Other Men. It Is All Reflection.

The Motives That Lead Us To Do Anything Might Be Arranged Like The Thirty-two Winds And Might Be Given Names On The Same Pattern: For Instance, "bread-bread-fame" Or "fame-fame-bread."

No Despotism Is So Formidable As That Of A Religion Or A Scientific System.

It Not Seldom Happens That In The Purposeless Rovings And Wanderings Of The Imagination We Hunt Down Such Game As Can Be Put To Use By Our Purposeful Philosophy In Its Well-ordered Household.

To Receive Applause For Works Which Do Not Demand All Our Powers Hinders Our Advance Towards A Perfecting Of Our Spirit. It Usually Means That Thereafter We Stand Still.

When A Book And A Head Collide And A Hollow Sound Is Heard, Must It Always Have Come From The Book?

You Can Make A Good Living From Soothsaying But Not From Truthsaying.

The Natural Scientists Of The Previous Age Knew Less Than We Do And Believed They Were Very Close To The Goal: We Have Taken Very Great Steps In Its Direction And Now Discover We Are Still Very Far Away From It. With The Most Rational Philosophers An Increase In Their Knowledge Is Always Attended By An Increased Conviction Of Their Ignorance.

Delicacy In Woman Is Strength.

A Handful Of Soldiers Is Always Better Than A Mouthful Of Arguments.

The Great Rule: If The Little Bit You Have Is Nothing Special In Itself, At Least Find A Way Of Saying It That Is A Little Bit Special.

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 Flavor Them With Lies.

One Of The Greatest Creations Of The Human Mind Is The Art Of Reviewing Books Without Having Read Them.

What Is The Good Of Drawing Conclusions From Experience? I Don't Deny We Sometimes Draw The Right Conclusions, But Don't We Just As Often Draw The Wrong Ones?

Too Much Is Unwholesome.

To Do The Opposite Of Something Is Also A Form Of Imitation, Namely An Imitation Of Its Opposite.

Bad Writers Are Those Who Try To Express Their Own Feeble Ideas In The Language Of Good Ones.

Food Probably Has A Very Great Influence On The Condition Of Men. Wine Exercises A More Visible Influence, Food Does It More Slowly But Perhaps Just As Surely. Who Knows If A Well-prepared Soup Was Not Responsible For The Pneumatic Pump Or A Poor One For A War?

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.

It Is A Question Whether, When We Break A Murderer On The Wheel, We Do Not Fall Into The Error A Child Makes When It Hits The Chair It Has Bumped Into.

I Have Often Noticed That When People Come To Understand A Mathematical Proposition In Some Other Way Than That Of The Ordinary Demonstration, They Promptly Say, "oh, I See. That's How It Must Be." This Is A Sign That They Explain It To Themselves From Within Their Own System.

What Makes Our Poetry So Contemptible Nowadays Is Its Paucity Of Ideas. If You Want To Be Read, Invent. Who The Devil Wouldn't Like To Read Something New?

He Who Says He Hates All Kinds Of Flattery, And Says So In Earnest, Has Undoubtedly Not As Yet Become Acquainted With All Kinds Of It, Whether In Substance Or In Form.

The Journalists Have Constructed For Themselves A Little Wooden Chapel, Which They Also Call 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.

Everyone Who Has Ever Written Will Have Discovered That Writing Always Awakens Something Which, Though It Lay Within Us, We Failed Clearly To Recognize Before.

I Have Never Yet Met Anyone Who Did Not Think It Was An Agreeable Sensation To Cut Tinfoil With Scissors.

The Proof That Man Is The Noblest Of All Creatures Is That No Other Creature Has Ever Denied It.

Be Wary Of Passing The Judgment: Obscure. To Find Something Obscure Poses No Difficult, Elephants And Poodles Find Many Things Obscure.

There Is A Great Difference Between Believing In Something And Believing In It Again.

Believing In Something

So-called Professional Mathematicians Have, In Their Reliance On The Relative Incapacity Of The Rest Of Mankind, Acquired For Themselves A Reputation For Profundity Very Similar To The Reputation For Sanctity Possessed By Theologians.

Above All Things Expand The Frontiers Of Science: Without This The Rest Counts For Nothing.

As Soon As You Know A Man To Be Blind, You Imagine That You Can See It From His Back.

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.

It Is With Epigrams As With Other Inventions; The Best Ones Annoy Us Because We Didn't Think Of Them Ourselves.

A Good Part Of The Fame Of Most Celebrated Men Is Due To The Shortsightedness Of Their Admirers

Actual Aristocracy Cannot Be Abolished By Any Law: All The Law Can Do Is Decree How It Is To Be Imparted And Who Is To Acquire It.

I Have Remarked Very Clearly That I Am Often Of One Opinion When I Am Lying Down And Of Another When I Am Standing Up.

How Few Friends Would Remain Friends If Each Could See The Sentiments Of The Other In Their Entirety.

The Drive To Propagate Our Race Has Also Propagated A Lot Of Other Things

Doubt Must Be No More Than Vigilance, Otherwise It Can Become Dangerous.

There Are People Who Believe Everything Is Sane And Sensible That Is Done With A Solemn Face.

He Who Is Enamored Of Himself Will At Least Have The Advantage Of Being Inconvenienced By Few Rivals.

Never Undertake Anything For Which You Wouldn't Have The Courage To Ask The Blessings Of Heaven.

In Every Man There Is Something Of All Men.

It Is A Dangerous Thing For The Perfecting Of Our Minds To Gain Applause By Works That Do Not Call Forth The Whole Of Our Energies; For In That Case One Generally Comes To A Standstill.

If Brandy Was Made Out Of Sparrows There Would Soon Be No Sparrows.

It Often Takes More Courage To Change One's Opinion Than To Stick To It.

Once We Know Our Weaknesses They Cease To Do Us Any Harm.

To Write Brashly About Some Things, It Is Almost Necessary Not To Know Much About Them.

A Man Always Writes Absolutely Well Whenever He Writes In His Own Manner, But The Wigmaker Who Tries To Write Like Gellert ... Writes Badly.

He Was Always Smoothing And Polishing Himself, And In The End He Became Blunt Before He Was Sharp.

Self Improvement

Where The Frontier Of Science Once Was Is Now The Centre.

God Creates The Animals, Man Creates Himself.

What Most Clearly Characterizes True Freedom And Its True Employment Is Its Misemployment.

Cautiousness In Judgment 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.

It Is Almost Impossible To Carry The Torch Of Truth Through A Crowd Without Singeing Somebody's Beard.

There Is Something In Our Minds Like Sunshine And The Weather, Which Is Not Under Our Control. When I Write, The Best Things Come To Me From I Know Not Where.

Nothing Puts A Greater Obstacle In The Way Of The Progress Of Knowledge Than Thinking That One Knows What One Does Not Yet Know.

A Good Means To Discovery Is To Take Away Certain Parts Of A System To Find Out How The Rest Behaves.

What A Blessing It Would Be If We Could Open And Shut Our Ears...as Easily As We Open And Shut Our Eyes.

We Can See Nothing Whatever Of The Soul Unless It Is Visible In The Expression Of The Countenance; One Might Call The Faces At A Large Assembly Of People A History Of The Human Soul Written In A Kind Of Chinese Ideograms.

When An Acquaintance Goes By I Often Step Back From My Window, Not So Much To Spare Him The Effort Of Acknowledging Me As To Spare Myself The Embarrassment Of Seeing That He Has Not Done So.

As Nations Improve, So Do Their Gods.

One Can Live In This World On Soothsaying But Not On Truth Saying.

We Cannot Remember Too Often That When We Observe Nature, And Especially The Ordering Of Nature, It Is Always Ourselves Alone We Are Observing.

The "second Sight" Possessed By The Highlanders In Scotland Is Actually A Foreknowledge Of Future Events. I Believe They Possess This Gift Because They Don't Wear Trousers.

A Man Has Virtues Enough If He Deserves Pardon For His Faults On Account Of Them.

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.

They Do Not Think, Therefore They Are Not.

One Should Never Trust A Person Who, While Assuring You Of Something, Puts His Hands On His Heart.

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.

After All, Is Our Idea Of God Anything More Than Personified Incomprehensibility?

The Lower Classes Of Men, Though They Do Not Think It Worthwhile To Record What They Perceive, Nevertheless Perceive Everything That Is Worth Noting; The Difference Between Them And A Man Of Learning Often Consists In Nothing More Than The Latter's Facility For Expression.

Great Men Too Make Mistakes, And Many Among Them Do It So Often That One Is Almost Tempted To Call Them Little Men.

Virtue By Premeditation Isn't Worth Much.

Be Attentive, Feel Nothing In Vain, Measure And Compare: This Is The Whole Law Of Philosophy.

Sickness Is Mankind's Greatest Defect.

The Man Was Such An Intellectual He Was Of Almost No Use.

To Do Just The Opposite Is Also A Form Of Imitation.

A Good Metaphor Is Something Even The Police Should Keep An Eye On.

Body And Soul: A Horse Harnessed Beside An Ox.

One Use Of Dreams Is That, Unprejudiced By Our Often Forced And Artificial Reflections, They Represent The Impartial Outcome Of Our Entire Being.

Superstition Originates Among Ordinary People In The Early And All Too Zealous Instruction They Receive In Religion: They Hear Of Mysteries, Miracles, Deeds Of The Devil, And Consider It Very Probable That Things Of This Sort Could Occur In Everything Anywhere.

Honest Unaffected Distrust Of Human Abilities Under All Circumstances Is The Surest Sign Of Strength Of Mind.

What We Are Able To Judge With Feeling Is Very Little; The Rest Is All Prejudice And Complaisance.

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.

One Cannot Demand Of A Scholar That He Show Himself A Scholar Everywhere In Society, But The Whole Tenor Of His Behavior Must None The Less Betray The Thinker, He Must Always Be Instructive, His Way Of Judging A Thing Must Even In The Smallest Matters Be Such That People Can See What It Will Amount To When, Quietly And Self-collected, He Puts This Power To Scholarly Use.

We Have To Believe That Everything Has A Cause, As The Spider Spins Its Web In Order To Catch Flies. But It Does This Before It Knows There Are Such Things As Flies.

A Book Is A Mirror: If An Ape Looks Into It An Apostle Is Hardly Likely To Look Out.

Reading Means Borrowing.

Libraries Can In General Be Too Narrow Or Too Wide For The Soul.

One Of The Greatest And Also The Commonest Of Faults Is For Men To Believe That, Because They Never Hear Their Shortcomings Spoken Of, Or Read About Them In Cold Print, Others Can Have No Knowledge Of Them.

To Read Means To Borrow; To Create Out Of One S Readings Is Paying Off One's Debts.

If We Make A Couple Of Discoveries Here And There We Need Not Believe Things Will Go On Like This For Ever. Just As We Hit Water When We Dig In The Earth, So We Discover The Incomprehensible Sooner Or Later.

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.

Those Who Never Have Time Do Least

Perhaps In Time The So-called Dark Ages Will Be Thought Of As Including Our Own.

There Is Something In The Character Of Every Man Which Cannot Be Broken In--the Skeleton Of His Character; And To Try To Alter This Is Like Training A Sheep For Draught Purposes.

Some People Read Only Because They Are Too Lazy To Think.

Many A Man Who Is Willing To Be Shot For His Belief In A Miracle Would Have Doubted, Had He Been Present At The Miracle Itself.

Ask Yourself Always: How Can This Be Done Better?

What Is Called An Acute Knowledge Of Human Nature Is Mostly Nothing But The Observer's Own Weaknesses Reflected Back From Others.

It Is In Most Cases More Difficult To Make Intelligent People Believe That You Are What You Are Not, Than Really To Become What You Would Appear To Be.

There Are People Who Can Believe Anything They Wish. What Lucky Creatures!

Man Loves Company - Even If It Is Only That Of A Small Burning Candle.

Everyone Is A Genius At Least Once A Year.

A Writer Who Wishes To Be Read By Posterity Must Not Be Averse To Putting Hints Which Might Give Rise To Whole Books, Or Ideas For Learned Discussions, In Some Corner Of A Chapter So That One Should Think He Can Afford To Throw Them Away By The Thousand.

The Celebrated Painter Gainsborough Got As Much Pleasure From Seeing Violins As From Hearing Them.

He Marvelled At The Fact That The Cats Had Two Holes Cut In Their Fur At Precisely The Spot Where Their Eyes Were.

A Schoolteacher Or Professor Cannot Educate Individuals, He Educates Only Species.

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.

Man Is Perhaps Half Mind And Half Matter In The Same Way As The Polyp Is Half Plant And Half Animal. The Strangest Creatures Are Always Found On The Border Lines Of Species.

Marriage, In Contrast To The Flu, Starts With A Fever And Ends With The Chills.

Universal Morality Is To Be Found In Little Everyday Penny-events Just As Much As In Great Ones.

There Are People Who Believe Everything Is Sane And Sensible That Is Done With A Solemn Face. ... It Is No Great Art To Say Something Briefly When, Like Tacitus, One Has Something To Say; When One Has Nothing To Say, However, And None The Less Writes A Whole Book And Makes Truth ... Into A Liar - That I Call An Achievement.

We Accumulate Our Opinions At An Age When Our Understanding Is At Its Weakest.

Pain Warns Us Not To Exert Our Limbs To The Point Of Breaking Them. How Much Knowledge Would We Not Need To Recognize This By The Exercise Of Mere Reason.

Love Is Blind, But Marriage Restores Its Sight.

What We Have To Discover For Ourselves Leaves Behind In Our Mind A Pathway That Can Be Used On Another Occasion.

The Greatest Things In The World Are Brought About By Other Things Which We Count As Nothing: Little Causes We Overlook But Which At Length Accumulate.

The Most Dangerous Untruths Are Truths Slightly Distorted.

Man Is So Perfectable And Corruptible He Can Become A Fool Through Good Sense.

Fools And Foolishness

It Is Hardly To Be Believed How Spiritual Reflections When Mixed With A Little Physics Can Hold People's Attention And Give Them A Livelier Idea Of God Than Do The Often Ill-applied Examples Of His Wrath.

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.

Doubt Everything At Least Once, Even The Sentence "two Times Two Is Four."

Man Is A Masterpiece Of Creation, If Only Because No Amount Of Determinism Can Prevent Him From Believing That He Acts As A Free Being.

Nowadays Three Witty Turns Of Phrase And A Lie Make A Writer.

If We Thought More For Ourselves We Would Have Very Many More Bad Books And Very Many More Good Ones.

Before One Blames, One Should Always Find Out Whether One Cannot Excuse.

An Hour-glass Is A Reminder Not Only Of Time's Quick Flight, But Also Of The Dust To Which We Must At Last Return

One Is Rarely An Impulsive Innovator After The Age Of Sixty, But One Can Still Be A Very Fine Orderly And Inventive Thinker. One Rarely Procreates Children At That Age, But One Is All The More Skilled At Educating Those Who Have Already Been Procreated, And Education Is Procreation Of Another Kind.

Do Not Judge God's World From Your Own. Trim Your Own Hedge As You Wish And Plant Your Flowers In The Patterns You Can Understand, But Do Not Judge The Garden Of Nature From Your Little Window Box.

Many Things About Our Bodies Would Not Seem To Us So Filthy And Obscene If We Did Not Have The Idea Of Nobility In Our Heads.

God Created Man In His Own Image, Says The Bible; Philosophers Reverse The Process: They Create God In Theirs.

Some People Feel With Their Heads And Think With Their Hearts.

I Forget The Greater Part Of What I Read, But All The Same It Nourishes My Mind.

To Make A Vow Is A Greater Sin Than To Break One.

The Worst Thing You Can Possibly Do Is Worrying And Thinking About What You Could Have Done.

If An Angel Were To Tell Us About His Philosophy, I Believe Many Of His Statements Might Well Sound Like '2 X 2= 13'.

If Nature Be Regarded As The Teacher And We Poor Human Beings As Her Pupils, The Human Race Presents A Very Curious Picture. We All Sit Together At A Lecture And Possess The Necessary Principles For Understanding It, Yet We Always Pay More Attention To The Chatter Of Our Fellow Students Than To The Lecturer's Discourse. Or, If Our Neighbor Copies Something Down, We Sneak It From Him, Stealing What He Himself May Have Heard Imperfectly, And Add It To Our Own Errors Of Spelling And Opinion.

Imagine The World So Greatly Magnified That Particles Of Light Look Like Twenty-four-pound Cannon Balls.

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.

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.

The Book Which Most Deserved To Be Banned Would Be A Catalog Of Banned Books.

Never Undertake Anything Unless You Have The Heart To Ask Heaven's Blessing On Your Undertaking.

It Is Too Bad If You Have To Do Everything Upon Reflection And Can't Do Anything From Early Habit.

The Fly That Doesn't Want To Be Swatted Is Most Secure When It Lights On The Fly-swatter.

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.

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.

I Believe That Man Is In The Last Resort So Free A Being That His Right To Be What He Believes Himself To Be Cannot Be Contested.

Ambition And Suspicion Always Go Together.

Ideas Too Are A Life And A World.

Brevity: To Say At Once Whatever Is To Be Said.

As The Few Adepts In Such Things Well Know, Universal Morality Is To Be Found In Little Everyday Penny-events Just As Much As In Great Ones. There Is So Much Goodness And Ingenuity In A Raindrop That An Apothecary Wouldn't Let It Go For Less Than Half-a-crown.

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.

If All Mankind Were Suddenly To Practice Honesty, Many Thousands Of People Would Be Sure To Starve.

Rational Free Spirits Are The Light Brigade Who Go On Ahead And Reconnoiter The Ground Which The Heavy Brigade Of The Orthodox Will Eventually Occupy.

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.

Just As There Are Polysyllabic Words That Say Very Little, So There Are Also Monosyllabic Words Of Infinite Meaning.

It Is A Sure Evidence Of A Good Book If It Pleases Us More And More As We Grow Older.

People Who Have Read A Good Deal Rarely Make Great Discoveries. I Do Not Say This In Excuse Of Laziness, But Because Invention Presupposes An Extensive Independent Contemplation Of Things.

We Say That Someone Occupies An Official Position, Whereas It Is The Official Position That Occupies Him.

Everyone Should Study At Least Enough Philosophy And Belles-lettres To Make His Sexual Experience More Delectable.

To Err Is Human Also In So Far As Animals Seldom Or Never Err, Or At Least Only The Cleverest Of Them Do So.

With Prophecies The Commentator Is Often A More Important Man Than The Prophet.

Even Truth Needs To Be Clad In New Garments If It Is To Appeal To A New Age.

I Look Upon Book Reviews As An Infantile Disease Which New-born Books Are Subject To.

The Noble Simplicity In The Works Of Nature Only Too Often Originates In The Noble Shortsightedness Of Him Who Observes It.

It Is A Great Shame; Most Of Our Words Are Misused Tools / Which Often Still Smell Of The Mud In Which Previous Owners / Desecrated Them.

One's First Step In Wisdom Is To Question Everything - And One's Last Is To Come To Terms With Everything.

Astronomy Is Perhaps The Science Whose Discoveries Owe Least To Chance, In Which Human Understanding Appears In Its Whole Magnitude, And Through Which Man Can Best Learn How Small He Is.

We Have No Words For Speaking Of Wisdom To The Stupid. He Who Understands The Wise Is Wise Already.

He Who Says He Hates Every Kind Of Flattery, And Says It In Earnest, Certainly Does Not Yet Know Every Kind Of Flattery.

The More Experiences And Experiments Accumulate In The Exploration Of Nature, The More Precarious The Theories Become. But It Is Not Always Good To Discard Them Immediately On This Account. For Every Hypothesis Which Once Was Sound Was Useful For Thinking Of Previous Phenomena In The Proper Interrelations And For Keeping Them In Context. We Ought To Set Down Contradictory Experiences Separately, Until Enough Have Accumulated To Make Building A New Structure Worthwhile.

The Ordinary Man Is Ruined By The Flesh Lusting Against The Spirit; The Scholar By The Spirit Lusting Too Much Against The Flesh.

It Is Said That Truth Comes From The Mouths Of Fools And Children: I Wish Every Good Mind Which Feels An Inclination For Satire Would Reflect That The Finest Satirist Always Has Something Of Both In Him.

To Make Astute People Believe One Is What One Is Not Is, In Most Cases, Harder Than Actually To Become What One Wishes To Appear.

In Each Of Us There Is A Little Of All Of Us.

The Human Tendency To Regard Little Things As Important Has Produced Very Many Great Things.

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 Genius Consists.

First There Is A Time When We Believe Everything, Then For A Little While We Believe With Discrimination, Then We Believe Nothing Whatever, And Then We Believe Everything Again - And, Moreover, Give Reasons Why We Believe.

If Countries Were Named After The Words You First Hear When You Go There, England Would Have To Be Called Damn It.

Man Is To Be Found In Reason, God In The Passions.

A Vacuum Of Ideas Affects People Differently Than A Vacuum Of Air, Otherwise Readers Of Books Would Be Constantly Collapsing.

Erudition Can Produce Foliage Without Bearing Fruit.

Non Cogitant, Ergo Non Sunt.

Man…who Lives In Three Places – In The Past, In The Present, And In The Future – Can Be Unhappy If One Of These Three Is Worthless. Religion Has Even Added A Fourth – Eternity.

A Book Which, Above All Others In The World, Should Be Forbidden, Is A Catalogue Of Forbidden Books.

To Be Content With Life Or To Live Merrily, Rather All That Is Required Is That We Bestow On All Things Only A Fleeting, Superficial Glance; The More Thoughtful We Become The More Earnest We Grow.

Superficial Things

Courage, Garrulousness And The Mob Are On Our Side. What More Do We Want?

All Mathematical Laws Which We Find In Nature Are Always Suspect To Me, In Spite Of Their Beauty. They Give Me No Pleasure. They Are Merely Auxiliaries. At Close Range It Is All Not True.

The Highest Level Than Can Be Reached By A Mediocre But Experienced Mind Is A Talent For Uncovering The Weaknesses Of Those Greater Than Itself.

Everyone Is Perfectly Willing To Learn From Unpleasant Experience - If Only The Damage Of The First Lesson Could Be Repaired.

I Am Grateful That I Am Not As Judgmental As All Those Censorious, Self-righteous People Around Me. In Each Of Us There Is A Little Of All Of Us.

One Has To Do Something New In Order To See Something New.

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