Deep Thoughts: Inspiration for the Uninspired (1992), Berkley Books, ISBN 0-425-13365-6
“The sure conviction that we could if we wanted to is the reason so many good minds are idle.”
K 27
Aphorisms (1765-1799), Notebook K (1789-1793)
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Georg Christoph Lichtenberg 137
German scientist, satirist 1742–1799Related quotes

“The idle mind knows not what it wants.”
Otioso in otio animus nescit quid velit.
As quoted by Aulus Gellius in Noctes Atticae (Attic Nights), Book XIX, Chapter X
Iphigenia

"Interview with F.W. de Klerk", BBC Summary of World Broadcasts (9 May 1990)
1990s

useful ways to combine different fragments of knowledge.
K-Linesː A Theory of Memory (1980)
Prayer and the Art of Volkswagen Maintenance (2000, Harvest House Publishers)

“There is this first benefit from myths, that we have to search and do not have our minds idle.”
III. Concerning myths; that they are divine, and why.
On the Gods and the Cosmos
Context: There is this first benefit from myths, that we have to search and do not have our minds idle.
That the myths are divine can be seen from those who have used them. Myths have been used by inspired poets, by the best of philosophers, by those who established the mysteries, and by the Gods themselves in oracles. But why the myths are divine it is the duty of philosophy to inquire. Since all existing things rejoice in that which is like them and reject that which is unlike, the stories about the Gods ought to be like the Gods, so that they may both be worthy of the divine essence and make the Gods well disposed to those who speak of them: which could only be done by means of myths.

2010s, Democratic National Convention speech (2012)

12 September 1936, Advice to the pupils of the Bishop Cotton School, Simla, also quoted in Speeches and Statements of the Marquess of Linlithgow, p. 19-20