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About this quote

What does it mean?
A collision between book and head producing sound suggests ignorance, but the source of ignorance isn't always the book.
In plain terms
Who is really empty-headed—the person or the book?
What can you take from it?
Don't blame the book for your empty head.

Where it applies

  • reading groups
  • debates
  • teaching

Putting it to work

  • question assumptions
  • check your reading
  • critique ideas

Questions to consider

  • When did you blame a book for your confusion?
  • Is ignorance always the reader's fault?

Another view

It assumes sound indicates mental emptiness specifically.

More from Georg Christoph Lichtenberg

  1. What makes our poetry so contemptible nowadays is its paucity of ideas. If you want to be read, invent. Who the Devil wouldn't like to read something new?

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  2. There are people who possess not so much genius as a certain talent for perceiving the desires of the century, or even of the decade, before it has done so its…

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  3. That man is the noblest creature may also be inferred from the fact that no other creature has yet contested this claim.

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