"I don't know anyone who heard the grass grow so clearly"
Albert Einstein

«Lichtenberg has written the richest book in universal literature»
Elias Canetti

Leaving Goethe aside, what is really left of German literary prose worth reading over and over again? Lichtenberg»
nietzsche

«If aphorisms are one-line novels, those of the Göttingen scientist and thinker are among the most appreciable and comical»
Enrique Vila-Matas

First edition in Spanish of the Cuadernos (Sudelbücher) by Georg Christoph Lichtenberg, from which all existing anthological editions in Spanish have been extracted, and which have been commonly titled Aphorisms. This volume, the first of the complete works that we are now publishing under the translation of Carlos Fortea, with a prologue by Jaime Fernández, includes his work according to the canonical edition.

It was not until after his death that the famous Cuadernos (Sudelbücher) by Georg Christoph Lichtenberg were published, of which the full version of the first three is offered for the first time in Spanish in this first volume. It is a miscellany of sharp, insightful, serene and at the same time funny reflections, loaded with sympathy, vivacity and irony, on the body, love, sexuality, dreams, loneliness, language, religion, death. , the world of books, science, philosophy and the political situation of the moment. Lichtenberg is revealed as a deep connoisseur of the human condition. However, in his observations there is not an iota of dogmatism or any sign of intellectual or moral superiority. On the contrary, a tireless curiosity prompted him to be interested in everything around him and in the news he received from the world, such as the events that led to the French Revolution of 1789. Although he identified with the humanist values of the Enlightenment, he was one of the first to glimpse in enlightened pessimism a hidden apology for modern despotism.

Kant read it carefully. Goethe compared his writings to a marvelous magic wand "which turned his jokes into hidden problems." For Nietzsche, with the exception of Eckermann's Conversations with Goethe, his work was the only German prose worth reading over and over again. The deep imprint of his reflections is visible in Schopenhauer. Tolstoy was a devoted reader of his work. Freud said that his jokes stand out for their intellectual content and the certainty with which they hit the mark. André Breton considered him one of the great masters of humor and "father of pataphysics". Canetti commented that he had written the richest book in world literature because he never wanted to round off anything, which "is his happiness and ours."