One of my favourite writers is Georg Christoph Lichenberg (1742-1799) to whose aphorisms I turn to when I need some light (though not trivial) mental relief. I list some of my favourites below (his ascerbic tone bound to upset several constituencies), culled from his notebooks and translated by the great Reg Hollingdale in Aphorisms published by Penguin (1990).
NOTEBOOK B:
#50 How did you enjoy yourself with these people? Answer: very much, almost as much as I do when alone.
#57 It is a fault which the merely clever writer has in common with the downright bad one that he commonly fails to illuminate his actual subject but employs it only to show off. We get to know the writer but nothing else . . .
NOTEBOOK F:
#80 There are fanatics without ability, and then they are really dangerous people.
#84 There exists a species of transcendental ventriloquism by means of which men can be made to believe that something said on earth comes from Heaven.
#88 Much can be inferred about a man from his mistress: in her one beholds his weaknesses and his dreams . . .
#97 It is just as easy to dream without sleeping as it is to sleep without dreaming.
#117 A pure heart and a clean shirt. (A pure heart is an excellent thing, and so is a clean shirt.)
#144 Much reading has brought upon us a learned barbarism.
NOTEBOOK G:
#30 To err is human in so far as animals seldom or never err, or at least only the cleverest of them do so.
NOTEBOOK J:
#19 I forget most of what I have 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.
#30 The true function of the writer in relation to mankind is continually to say what most people think or feel without realizing it. Mediocre writers say only what everyone would have said . . .
#33 Enlightenment in all classes of society really consists in correctly grasping what our essential needs are.
#87 He had learned to play a couple of little pieces on the keyboard of metaphysics.
#92 Most propagators of a faith defend their propositions, not because they are convinced of their truth, but because they once asserted they were true.
NOTEBOOK K:
#74 The only fault one can impute to genuinely fine writings is that they are usually the cause of very bad or mediocre ones.
NOTEBOOK L:
#97 Is our conception of God anything more than personified incomprehensibility?
manwithoutqualities 