Page:The reflections of Lichtenberg.djvu/134

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130
LICHTENBERG'S REFLECTIONS

should always remember slightly to raise those to whom we stoop.


I must myself have noticed quite a hundred times, and do not doubt but that my readers have done so a hundred and one, that books with a very striking and ingenious title are seldom worth very much. Presumably the title has been thought of before the book itself, and possibly even by some other person.


It is a pity that we cannot examine an author's literary entrails, so as to see on what wisdom he has been feeding.


I am convinced—at any rate according to the ideas which I myself have formed of the capacity of the human mind—that even with all the approximations in our analysis things will one day go better. It is this improving of beaten paths that delays intellectual progress. New paths !—that is what must be the word, if posterity is to believe that progress was foreseen.