G.C. Lichtenberg Quotes

Daily I’ll try to translate continuously aphorisms by Georg Christoph Lichtenberg 1742 – 1799. If there are mistakes in my translations: support is very appreciated: https://twitter.com/frizztext

#words Most words are abused tools that smell like dirt. I want to work with new words. B 346

#conscience I’m not talking with your joke, who knows how to palliate everything but with your moral conscience. B 375

#FreedomOfSpeech Everyone gets by his entry to this world the right to say how it seems to him. B 366

#democracy Away with this accursed democracy where everyone wants to lead the word! Here I stand firmly, be what you want. B 334

#sex If the head shouldn’t be hearing the demands of the lower abdomen, why should nature have needed to connect them? B 323

#meaning We don’t remember that a word had ever used differently in a society than with the usual, once specified meaning. B 319

#thinking It’s a question of “which is more difficult: to think or not to think?” B 308

#reading we need to consult all the steps: Why do I believe this? Does it follow from my other thought system? B 285

#book The world appreciates a book only after the weight, not according to the time in which it was achieved. B 271

#exist One has to find out of the rubble of other people’s things to feel yourself, begin to talk, to exist. B 264

#thoughts There are certain trade winds in the thoughts. One may control and maneuver as you want, the thoughts are driven there. B 263

#Slowness He moved so slowly like an hour hand with a bunch of seconds pointers. B 258

#room One can look at a room for a kind of a second body. B 253

#Writers lie down, you can say, like bears in winter and suck out their paw. B 223

#warmth It was hasty, but I did it with the warmth, without which my life would be worthless. B 212

#Joy shows itself in the feet. B 125

#Disgust: An ability to bring the stock of terms in your head into subclasses with the band of a nauseating similarity. B 102

#range I make use of the printing press here only instead of a mouthpiece with a range limited to 300 step. B 114

#thinking How do you teach a child that it is not merely learning WHAT the ancients thought, but HOW they thought? B 95

#aggression He does not know what he hates more, young officers or young preachers. B 81

#cheerfulness He’ll like cheerfulness and frivolity as properties of his soul, which gave him the happiest hours of his life. B 81

#moral Every man has his moral backside, which he covers up with the trousers of good decorum as long as possible. B 78

#face The soul sets the face around them self as the magnet the filings. #aphorism B 69

#centering The whole man must move together. Every expression of a human has to have the same goal. B 31

#local A major distinguishing sign of a Great Spirit is not to get carried away by local mentality. B 22

#sugar He writes very bitterly. You have to stir him until the sugar melts inside of him. B 14

#lust The mob is ruined by the flesh battling against the Spirit, and the scholar by the Spirit acting vs. his flesh. B 21

#writing He writes very bitterly. You have to stir him until the sugar melts inside of him. B 14

#writing Bad writing means: too easy to understand and too German, to be held for the work of some orang-utan. B 11

#words Some have even in their words something of their own. It takes a lot of self-confidence and independence to do so. A 138

#moral The moral sensitivity is, I think, in the morning stronger than in the evening. A 132

#dreams often lead us into the circumstances in which we awake could not have been involved. A 125

#ingenuity People who imitate too strong, weaken their own ingenuity. A 122

#fine There may be creatures that are so fine that they are not able to reach through a beam of light. A 121

#Meaning depends on 3 factors: intonation, expression, dictionary. A 93

#thoughts Good thoughts act consistently, in a way like sparks on the powder. A 56

#mob It is likely that most errors of the mob are submitted from their language. A 54

#coffee If I had been drinking a lot of coffee, I was shocked even BEFORE I heard the noise. A 50

#distrust Mostly I’ve seen mistrust linked with fierce ambition. A 46

#food The meal plans probably have a very large impact on the state of the people. A 43

#style There is an influence of style on our feelings and thoughts. A 22

#accent Rousseau rightly calls the accent the “soul of speech”. A 21

#black What an effect would it have on me if I had to sit in a very black-curtained large room? F 325