G 46
Variant translation: The inclination of people to consider small things as important has produced many great things.
Aphorisms (1765-1799), Notebook G (1779-1783)

“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.”

Georg Christoph Lichtenberg

K 29
Aphorisms (1765-1799), Notebook K (1789-1793)

“A clever child brought up with a foolish one can itself become foolish. Man is so perfectable and corruptible he can become a fool through good sense.”

Georg Christoph Lichtenberg

F 69
Aphorisms (1765-1799), Notebook F (1776-1779)

“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.”

Georg Christoph Lichtenberg

J 146
Aphorisms (1765-1799), Notebook J (1789)

“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.”

Georg Christoph Lichtenberg

K 51
Aphorisms (1765-1799), Notebook K (1789-1793)

“A schoolteacher or professor cannot educate individuals, he educates only species.”

Georg Christoph Lichtenberg

J 10
Aphorisms (1765-1799), Notebook J (1789)

“When a book and a head collide and a hollow sound is heard, must it always have come from the book?”

Georg Christoph Lichtenberg

D 66
Aphorisms (1765-1799), Notebook D (1773-1775)

“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.”

Georg Christoph Lichtenberg

F154
Aphorisms (1765-1799), Notebook F (1776-1779)

“Sickness is mankind's greatest defect.”

Georg Christoph Lichtenberg

F 100
Aphorisms (1765-1799), Notebook F (1776-1779)

“That man is the noblest creature may also be inferred from the fact that no other creature has yet contested this claim.”

Georg Christoph Lichtenberg

D 58
The proof that man is the noblest of all creatures is that no other creature has ever denied it.
Aphorisms (1765-1799), Notebook D (1773-1775)