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The Waste Books QUOTES

The Waste Books QUOTES

1 " The most dangerous of all falsehoods is a slightly distorted truth. "

― Georg Christoph Lichtenberg , The Waste Books

2 " A book is a mirror: if an ape looks into it an apostle is hardly likely to look out. "

― Georg Christoph Lichtenberg , The Waste Books

3 " 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

4 " Nothing is more conductive to peace of mind than not having any opinions at all. "

― Georg Christoph Lichtenberg , The Waste Books

5 " A person reveals his character by nothing so clearly as the joke he resents. "

― Georg Christoph Lichtenberg , The Waste Books

6 " To do just the opposite is also a form of imitation. "

― Georg Christoph Lichtenberg , The Waste Books

7 " There are very many people who read simply to prevent themselves from thinking. "

― Georg Christoph Lichtenberg , The Waste Books

8 " Whenever he composes a critical review, I have been told, he gets an enormous erection. "

― Georg Christoph Lichtenberg , The Waste Books

9 " 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

10 " 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

11 " You can make a good living from soothsaying but not from truthsaying "

― Georg Christoph Lichtenberg , The Waste Books

12 " 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

13 " 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

14 " 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

15 " Nothing makes one old so quickly as the ever-present thought that one is growing older "

― Georg Christoph Lichtenberg , The Waste Books

16 " 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

17 " 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

18 " 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

19 " We say that someone occupies an official position, whereas it is the official position that occupies him. "

― Georg Christoph Lichtenberg , The Waste Books

20 " 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