When a book and a head collide and a hollow…

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

Sourced, Aphorisms (1765-1799)

D 66

Other Georg Christoph Lichtenberg Quotes

If you are going to build something in the air it is always better to build castles than houses of cards. - View Quote Details on If you are going to build something in the air…
There is no more important rule of conduct in the world than this: attach yourself as much as you can to people who are abler than you and yet not so very different that you cannot understand them. - View Quote Details on There is no more important rule of conduct in the…
A great speech is easy to learn by heart and a great poem even easier. How hard it would be to memorize as many words linked together senselessly, or a speech in a foreign tongue! Sense and understanding thus come to the aid of memory. Sense is order and order is in the last resort conformity with our nature. When we speak rationally we are only speaking in accordance with the nature of our being. That is why we devise genera and species in the case of plants and animals. The hypotheses we make belong here too: we are obliged to have them because otherwise we would unable to retain things… The question is, however, whether everything is legible to us. Certainly experiment and reflection enable us to introduce a significance into what is not legible, either to us or at all: thus we see faces or landscapes in the sand, though they are certainly not there. The introducion of symmetries belongs here too, silhouettes in inkblots, etc. Likewise the gradation we establish in the order of creatures: all this is not in the things but in us. In general we cannot remember too often that when we observe nature, and especially the ordering of nature, it is always ourselves alone we are observing. - View Quote Details on A great speech is easy to learn by heart and…
Here take back the stuff that I am, nature, knead it back into the dough of being, make of me a bush, a cloud, whatever you will, even a man, only no longer make me me. - View Quote Details on Here take back the stuff that I am, nature, knead…
One’s first step in wisdom is to question everything — and one’s last is to come to terms with everything. - View Quote Details on One’s first step in wisdom is to question everything —…
Georg Christoph Lichtenberg : Experimental Physics from the Spirit of Aphorism (PDF) - View Quote Details on Georg Christoph Lichtenberg : Experimental Physics from the Spirit of Aphorism…
If this is philosophy it is at any rate a philosophy that is not in its right mind. - View Quote Details on If this is philosophy it is at any rate a…
You must not allow your reading to dominate you but you should dominate your reading. - View Quote Details on You must not allow your reading to dominate you but…
To err is human also in so far as animals seldom or never err, or at least only the cleverest of them do so. - View Quote Details on To err is human also in so far as animals…
The noble simplicity in the works of nature only too often originates in the noble shortsightedness of him who observes it. - View Quote Details on The noble simplicity in the works of nature only too…