Nothing cheers me up so much as when I have succeeded in understanding something difficult, and yet I try so little to learn to understand difficult things. I ought to try to more often.
Nichts muntert mich mehr auf, als wenn ich etwas Schweres verstanden habe, und doch suche ich so wenig Schweres verstehen zu lernen. Ich sollte es öfter versuchen.
"A peculiar anthologic maze, an amusing literary chaos, a farrago of quotations, a mere olla podrida of quaintness, a pot pourri of pleasant delites, a florilegium of elegant extracts, a tangled fardel of old-world flowers of thought, a faggot of odd fancies, quips, facetiae, loosely tied" (Holbrook Jackson, Anatomy of Bibliomania) by a "laudator temporis acti," a "praiser of time past" (Horace, Ars Poetica 173).
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Sunday, November 29, 2015
I Should Try It More Often
Georg Christoph Lichtenberg (1742-1799), Waste Books, L 672 (tr. R.J. Hollingdale):