Waste Books - by Georg Christoph Lichtenberg
ISBN: 0940322501Date read: 2025-09-03
How strongly I recommend it: 10/10
(See my list of 430+ books, for more.)
Go to the Amazon page for details and reviews.
Tweets from 1765-1799 by a 4’9” hunchback physicist, friends with Goethe and Kant, admired by Nietzsche, Schopenhauer, etc. Such wonderful random thoughts, beautiful perspectives on thinking for yourself, observing nature, language, freedom, philosophy, religion, and more. Hundreds of initial insights, especially inspiring because they’re undeveloped.
my notes
He called them his “waste books” after the name given to notebooks kept by accountants in England for their rough calculations and lists of transactions, which were later transferred to a journal and finally to a formal ledger.
There is never a time when we are not doing philosophy, since our common language is embedded with philosophical views and commitments with which we always operate.
To match versification to thought is a very difficult art, the neglect of which is responsible for much ridiculous verse. Versification and thought are related to one another as in everyday life savoir-vivre is to occupation.
The superstition of ordinary people originates in their early and all too zealous instruction in religion, where they hear of secrets, miracles, and acts of the devil and believe it probable such things might occur everywhere in anything. If, however, they were first taught about nature, they would more readily regard the supernatural and mysterious aspects of religion with greater awe.
Prejudices are acquired instincts.
Through prejudice we can accomplish many things we would find too difficult to think through to the point of decision.
Tone lends meaning to a word.
It opens the possibility of infinitely enriching language without increasing the number of words.
A phrase pronounced in five different ways, each time with another meaning.
Yet a third variable: the facial expression.
We call people insane when their concepts no longer correspond to our orderly world.
Thus a careful observation of nature, or even mathematics, is certainly the most effective preventative of insanity.
Nature is the guide rope by which our thoughts are lead, so they do not stray.
It is a common source of our misfortune that we believe things actually to be what they really only mean.
Don’t believe things actually to be what they really only mean.
Passions and natural desires are the wings of the soul.
Be attentive. Experience nothing in vain.
Whatever you see, do, or read, it should always be brought to such a degree of clarity that you can at least answer the most general objections against it.
Growing wiser means becoming increasingly acquainted with the errors of feeling and judging.
Where must I turn my eyes to discover what no man has discovered before?
Things most often forgotten, places overlooked, and things accepted without question deserve most often to be investigated.
What we do not observe does not exist for us.
Whenever he had to reason, he felt like someone who had always used his right hand but was now forced to do something with his left.
To the wise, nothing is immeasurable and nothing insignificant.
In minor everyday occurrences one can discover a moral principle just as readily as in the major ones.
In our too-extensive reading, a profound philosophy is often required to restore to our feelings their initial state of innocence.
To extricate one's self from the detritus of alien ideas, to begin to feel for oneself, to speak for oneself, and, I might almost say, to exist for oneself.
Something that covers the distance between two ends of a grain of sand with the speed of lightning or light will appear to us to be at rest.
With history and knowledge, the beliefs of man also change.
To advance in one and abide in the other is impossible.
Do you perhaps believe that your convictions owe their strength to arguments?
Then you are undoubtedly mistaken, for if it were true everyone who heard them would have to be as convinced as you are.
Once we know our weaknesses, they cease to harm us.
Why they eat alone: because it is the right thing to do.
But why it is right? They would not and could not say.
The actual possession of something sometimes gives us no greater pleasure than merely imagining we possess it.
One can repeat something in a way that it has already been said, remove it from human understanding, or draw it closer.
The shallow mind does the first; the enthusiast, the second; and the true philosopher, the third.
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The shallow mind repeats something in a way that has already been said.
The enthusiast removes it from human understanding.
The true philosopher draws it closer.
Observing most educated people, one finds they do nothing themselves except cut their nails and quills.
Their hair is styled by others, their clothes made by others, their dishes prepared by others.
All so they can observe the weather in their own heads.
The man was such an intellectual he was of hardly any use in this world.
All mind and theory.
All head and not enough hand to sew on a button.
He had constructed for himself a certain system, which thereafter exercised such an influence upon his manner of thinking that onlookers always saw his judgment walking a few steps in front of his perceptions, though he himself believed it followed.
Many people know things in the way one knows the solution to a riddle after reading it or being told of it.
Cultivate the kind of knowledge that enables one to discover for oneself, when needed, what others must read or be told in order to know.
To do exactly the opposite of something is also a form of imitation.
A man of keen senses a shadow on the face appears blue or black.
Another who judges in advance does not see this and takes the entire face to be flesh colored.
It is thus essential to investigate correctly and compare what the senses show correctly.
Nothing is more difficult in philosophy than to take up an idea from the beginning, without already having in mind a certain end or purpose.
There is a great difference between still believing something and believing it again.
Still believing that the moon influences plants reveals stupidity and superstition.
But believing it again indicates philosophy and reflection.
If it were true, what in the end would be gained?
Nothing but another truth.
Is this of such great advantage?
We have enough old truths still to digest.
Once people have gotten such ideas into their heads, they are not so easily removed.
The best thing they can do is take a sound system of logic and go through their entire system of beliefs piece by piece until they have cleaned it up.
If mankind suddenly became virtuous, thousands would starve.
A book is a mirror: if an ape looks into it, an apostle is unlikely to look out.
We have no words for speaking about wisdom to idiots.
Whoever understands the wise is wise already.
We, the tail of the world, have no idea what the head is planning.
When we employ an old word, it often follows the channel dug in our understanding by the dictionary.
Metaphors dig a new channel, and often break through entirely.
The metaphor is far more clever than its author.
The author gives the metaphor its body, but the reader gives it its soul.
Among all the scholars I have known, the greatest thinkers I have known are those who had read the least.
I am often of one opinion while lying down and of another while standing.
That people who read so astonishingly much are often such bad thinkers may also have its origin in the constitution of our brain.
It is certainly not all the same whether I learn a proposition without effort or if I finally arrive at it myself through my own system of thought.
In the latter everything has its roots.
In the former it is merely superficial.
One rule in reading is to condense the intention and main thoughts of the author into a few words and in this way to make them one's own. Whoever reads in this way is occupied and gains something. When one reads without comparison with one's own inventory of knowledge or without synthesizing it with one's own system of thought, the mind gains nothing and loses much.
What people call a subtle knowledge of human nature is for the most part nothing other than one's own weaknesses reflected back from others.
Whoever knows himself properly can very soon know all other men. It is all reflection.
Most men live more according to fashion than reason.
The flour is important, not the mill. The fruits of philosophy, not the philosophy itself.
Philosophy is a laudable science, yet nobody uses it for their happiness or that of others.
Quite a few people read simply to prevent themselves from thinking.
Strive constantly for clear concepts - not merely by relying on the definitions of others, but as far as possible by personal inquiry.
Repeatedly scrutinize things with the intention of discovering something others have not yet observed.
It is so easy to shut our eyes and so difficult to shut our ears.
The greatest discoveries were made by people who regarded as merely probable what others advanced as certain.
If only I could dishabituate myself from everything, so I could see anew, hear anew, and feel anew.
Habit corrupts our philosophy.
The spider spins its web to catch flies. It does this before it knows flies exist.
If only children could be educated so that all things unclear were entirely incomprehensible to them.
With prophecies, the interpreter is often a more important man than the prophet.
Writing allows the thoughts and opinions of one man to reach posterity undistorted.
Tradition acquires something from every mouth.
Speaking is always a translation.
As soon as I know I am being deceived, it is no longer a deception.
What am I?
What shall I do?
What may I hope and believe?
All things in philosophy can be reduced to this.
Philosophers must consider and write about all things, even the most common ones.
This more than anything else brings focus to a system.
If the New Testament accurately contains the precepts of the Christian religion, then the Catholic religion is hardly Christian.
The Catholic religion received its present form in times of the grossest ignorance in which minds were fettered.
Now man who is once again permitted to exercise reason is supposed to continue to adhere to it.
It is necessary to agitate all of our knowledge and then let it settle again in order to see how everything is arranged.
Writing is an excellent means of awakening the system sleeping within each of us.
Anyone who has ever written will have discovered that writing always awakens something that, though it lay within us, we did not previously clearly recognize.
How did men ever arrive at the concept of freedom? It was grand idea.
Whoever has less than he desires must know he has more than he is worth.
The fly that does not want to be swatted is safest when it sits on the fly swatter.
Understanding something is no reason for believing that it is true.
In the end, everything leads to the question:
“Does thought originate in feeling or feeling in thought?”
This is the ultimate principle of religion.
The answer to the question, “Is the power of feeling or the power of thought the ultimate reality?” indicates the final limit between theism and atheism.
No matter how simple an idea, it will always govern something and abound somewhere.
The more one knows about a subject, the more quickly one is able to make an abstraction from it.
He shoots everything down from the mobile ambush of a kind of floating philosophy.
People learn to regard things as their teachers and acquaintances do.
That is why it would be quite useful for once to give instructions on how one can deviate from the rule.
Whenever I arrive at a new thought or theory, always to ask:
Is this really as new as you believe it to be?
This is also in general the best reminder never to be amazed at anything in the world.
Seek to see in everything something no one has yet seen or thought.
Ask in everything the question: Is this true?
Then seek reasons for why one believes it is not true.
To sense something outside oneself is a contradiction.
We sense things only within ourselves.
Wit is the finder, and understanding, the observer.
What odd chatter there would be in the world if we were to transform the names of things into definitions!
All mathematical laws we discover in nature are, despite their beauty, always suspect to me.
They bring me no joy.
They are merely for utility.
In close proximity, nothing is true.
The vibration of the air first becomes a sound where there is an ear.
What makes the study of a profound philosophy so difficult is that
in everyday life we regard a host of things as being so natural and simple that we believe it would not be possible for them to be any different,
yet we have to recognize that we must first accept that these supposed trivial things are of great importance
in order then to explain what is pronounced difficult about them.
What is really singular seldom remains unexplained for long.
What is inexplicable is usually no longer really singular and perhaps never has been.
If we regard nature as a teacher and poor mortals as her pupils,
we are inclined to make room for an altogether extraordinary idea about the human race:
We are sitting all together in a class and possess all of the principles necessary for understanding what is said,
yet we pay more attention to the chatter of other pupils than to the teacher's lessons.
And indeed when someone next to us does take notes, we cheat from him, stealing some remark that he himself perhaps indistinctly heard,
and supplementing it with our own orthographic and intellectual errors.
The prerogatives of beauty and those of happiness: the matter is quite different.
To enjoy the advantages of beauty in this world, other people must believe that we are beautiful.
Yet in the case of happiness, this is not necessary, for it is perfectly sufficient that we ourselves believe it.
Theorizing is excusable, for it is an impulse of the soul that can be useful to us as soon as we have accumulated sufficient experience.
Thus all our current follies of theorizing could be impulses that will find their application only in the future.
In dreams we so often take our own objections for those of another.
As for example when we dispute with someone, it surprises me that the same does not occur more often when we are awake.
The state of being awake seems primarily to consist in our making a sharp and conventional distinction between what is in us and outside us.
Spectacles for the powers of the mind just as there are for the eyes.
To make a vow is a greater sin than to break one.
It is a danger to the perfection of our spirit to receive acclaim for deeds that did not demand the entirety of our powers.
Thereafter one usually comes to a standstill.
No man has ever yet done all of which he was capable.
I do not believe that so-called truly pious people are good because they are pious but pious because they are good.
To establish liberty and equality as many people now think of them would mean to declare an eleventh commandment through which the other ten would be abolished.
Books are printed by people who do not understand them,
sold by people who do not understand them,
bound, reviewed, and read by people who do not understand them,
and now they are even written by people who do not understand them.
Comparison of a preacher and a locksmith:
One says: “You should not want to steal”.
The other says: “You should not be able to steal.”
The Socratic method sharpened: I mean torture.
Regarding things of a large scale, ask always: “What is this on a small scale?”
And with the small: “What is this on a large scale? How does this appear on a large or small scale?”
It is also good to make something as general as possible and explore from top to bottom the entire series of which it is a member.
All things belong to such a series whose polar members no longer appear to belong together.
Doubt all things at least once.
We have fallen into such a deep rut that we always follow others.
Great men are reproached for not having done as much good as they could have done.
They could reply: “Think of all the evil we could have done but did not do.”
Neither deny nor believe.
God is a sphere whose center is everywhere and whose surface is nowhere.
The defense of the monastic life is usually founded on an entirely erroneous concept of virtue.
These people have about the same concept of virtue as those who wish to call madhouses “academies of science” have of science.
Hamlet said that there are many things in heaven and on earth that are not mentioned in our compendia.
But then there are also many things in our compendia that can be found neither in heaven nor on earth.
Four principles of morality:
philosophical: do good for its own sake, out of respect for the law
religious: do good because it is God's will, out of love for God
human: do good because it promotes your happiness, out of self-love
political: do good because it promotes the welfare of society
English, French, German: the languages are all equally familiar to me.
It is harmful in a psychological respect to have so many signs in our heads for the same thing.
The word “incomparable” shows what can become of words in the world.
What most clearly characterizes true freedom and its true use is its abuse.
We speak often of enlightenment and desire more light.
But, my God, what good is all of this light when people either have no eyes or deliberately shut those they have?
We acquire the feeling of health only through illness.
The fewer needs one has, the happier one is.
Men are so glad to fight for religion and so reluctant to live according to its precepts.
How is whispering differentiated from speaking?
We so often speak of our persistence after death and so little about our existence before birth.
We should not say after death but before and after life.
Man is ultimately so free a being that his right to be what he believes himself to be cannot be contested.
We truly do a disservice to human nature when we believe that in order to have an opinion we must know what opinion another had.
There are plenty of men who trade in the ideas of others.
They find it a great merit to have discovered that a tenet thought new is already old.
This is done with the laudable intention to harm and belittle living men.