Aphorisms of German physicist Georg Lichtenberg (1742-1799):

• “Passionate ambition and suspicion I have invariably found to go together.”
• “It is in most cases more difficult to make intelligent people believe that you are what you are not, than really to become what you would appear to be.”
• “True, unaffected distrust of human power in general is the surest sign of mental ability.”
• “I am convinced that we not only love ourselves in others, but hate ourselves in others too.”
• “Where moderation is a fault indifference is a crime.”
• “I suppose there never was a man of any great mark who was not slandered; or hardly any blackguard who never directed a slander against some man of merit.”
• “Mankind loves company, even if it is no more than that of a burning candle.”
• “It is a fact that there are numbers of people who read merely that they need not think.”
• “With most people unbelief in one thing is founded upon blind belief in another.”
• “What is very rare seldom remains long unexplained. What is inexplicable is usually no longer rare, and has perhaps never been so.”
• “The commonest opinions and the things that everybody takes for granted often the most deserve examination.”
• “That in advancing years we should grow incapable of learning has some connection with age’s intolerance of being ordered about, and a very close connection, too.”
• “I have looked through the list of illnesses, and did not find cares or sad thoughts mentioned among them. That is a mistake, surely.”
• “Saints in stone have done more in the world than living ones.”

“Has anyone, I wonder, ever dreamt of odours, without an external cause to give rise to the impression? — dreamt, for instance, of the smell of roses, when there was no rose or rosewater in the vicinity. With music this is certainly the case, and with light too; but feelings of pain in a dream usually have some external cause. As regards odours I am uncertain.”