Physicist Georg Christoph Lichtenberg (1742-1799) is not widely remembered outside Germany — which is a great pity, as his notebooks contain some of history’s most trenchant aphorisms:

• “If countries were named after the words you first hear when you go there, England would have to be called Damn It.”
• “What they call ‘heart’ lies much lower than the fourth waistcoat button.”
• “What a pity it isn’t a sin to drink water, cried an Italian, how good it would taste.”
• “A book is a mirror: If an ape looks into it an apostle is hardly likely to look out.”
• “The often unreflected respect for old laws, old customs, and old religion we have to thank for all mischief in the world.”
• “It is we who are the measure of what is strange and miraculous: If we sought a universal measure the strange and miraculous would not occur and all things would be equal.”
• “Just as there are polysyllabic words that say very little, so there are also monosyllabic words of infinite meaning.”
• “If walking on two legs is not natural to man it is certainly an invention that does him credit.”
• “It is almost impossible to carry the torch of wisdom through a crowd without singeing someone’s beard.”
• “Now that education is so easy, men are drilled for greatness, just as dogs are trained to retrieve. In this way we’ve discovered a new sort of genius, those great at being drilled. These are the people who are mainly spoiling the market.”
• “Can it be that the evil in the world is in general of more use than the good?”

The “waste books” were admired by Wittgenstein, Schopenhauer, Nietzsche, and Freud, and even Tolstoy wondered “why the Germans of the present day neglect this writer so much.” He never got an answer.

George Moore was writing in his study when his aunt entered.

“I have sad news for you, Mr. Moore,” she said. “I regret to inform you that your friend Martin Ross is dead.”

Moore lowered his pen, sighed, and gazed quietly around him at the trappings of his long literary life. “How sad,” he said, “how sad. Here I am in the midst of this, alive … and my friend, my dear friend, Edmund Gosse, dead.”

“I beg your pardon, Mr. Moore,” the lady put in gently. “It is Martin Ross who is dead, not Edmund Gosse.”

Moore said, “Surely you don’t expect me to go through all that again?”

Thomas Macaulay was a child prodigy — and, one imagines, a trial to his parents:

• On seeing a chimney as a toddler, he asked his father, “Is that hell?”
• At 3 his mother told him he must learn to study without his bread and butter. He said, “Yes, mama, industry shall be my bread and attention my butter.”
• When he was 4 years old a servant spilled hot coffee on his legs; when the hostess inquired how he was feeling, he said, “Thank you, madam, the agony is abated.”
• When a housemaid threw away some oyster shells he’d been using to fence a garden plot, he marched into the drawing room and said, “Cursed be Sally, for it is written, ‘Cursed be he that removeth his neighbor’s landmark.'”

Reputedly his great gifts stayed with him throughout his life: As an old man he recited two poems he hadn’t seen since age 13.

In a 1952 survey of 200 traditional nursery rhymes, Geoffrey Handley-Taylor found that about half were “glorious and ideal for the child.” The others contained:

• 8 allusions to murder (unclassified)
• 2 cases of choking to death
• 1 case of death by devouring
• 1 case of cutting a human being in half
• 1 case of decapitation
• 1 case of death by squeezing
• 1 case of death by shriveling
• 1 case of death by starvation
• 1 case of boiling to death
• 1 case of death by hanging
• 3 cases of death by drowning
• 4 cases of killing domestic animals
• 1 case of body snatching
• 21 cases of death (unclassified)
• 7 cases relating to the severing of limbs
• 1 case of the desire to have a limb severed
• 4 cases relating to the breaking of limbs
• 1 allusion to a bleeding heart
• 1 case of devouring human flesh
• 9 threats of death
• 1 case of kidnapping
• 12 cases of torment and cruelty to human beings and animals
• 8 cases of whipping and lashing
• 3 allusions to blood
• 14 cases of stealing and general dishonesty
• 15 allusions to maimed human beings and animals
• 2 allusions to graves
• 23 cases of physical violence (unclassified)
• 1 case of lunacy
• 16 allusions to misery and sorrow
• 1 case of drunkenness
• 4 cases of cursing
• 1 allusion to marriage as a form of death
• 1 case of scorning the blind
• 1 case of scorning prayer
• 9 cases of children being lost or abandoned
• 2 cases of house burning
• 9 allusions to poverty and want
• 5 allusions to quarreling
• 2 cases of unlawful imprisonment
• 2 cases of racial discrimination

“Expressions of fear, weeping, moans of anguish, biting, pain and evidence of supreme selfishness may be found in almost every other page.”

The soul, aspiring, pants its source to mount,
As streams meander level with their fount.

That’s Robert Montgomery, in “The Omnipresence of the Deity.” Thomas Macaulay writes:

We take this to be, on the whole, the worst similitude the world. In the first place, no stream meanders, or can possibly meander level with its fount. In the next place, if streams did meander level with their founts, no two motions can be less like each other than that of meandering level and that of mounting upwards.

“Those who write clearly have readers,” wrote Camus. “Those who write obscurely have commentators.”