Success Quote by Gotthold Ephraim Lessing

Lessing’s line is a scalpel aimed at the smug, unflappable rationalist. On its face it praises composure’s opposite: losing your wits. But the joke has teeth. He’s arguing that there are “certain things” so morally or intellectually urgent that remaining perfectly calm isn’t strength; it’s evidence of dullness, cowardice, or a soul anesthetized by comfort. The paradox works because it flips Enlightenment-era self-image on itself: if reason is your badge, prove you’re alive to what demands reason’s limits.

The phrasing is doing double duty. “Certain things” is coy and strategic, an invitation to fill in the blanks with the era’s flashpoints: censorship, religious dogma, abuses of authority, the policing of thought. Lessing, a critic and polemicist in a Germany of fractured principalities and tight constraints on publishing, knew that outrage could be both moral clarity and political risk. By keeping the objects unnamed, he turns the sentence into a portable test of conscience.

Subtextually, it’s also a warning to critics: detachment can curdle into complicity. Lessing’s own career was built on insisting that art, theology, and public argument matter enough to agitate the mind. To “lose your wits” isn’t to abandon reason permanently; it’s to show that your reason has stakes. The person who never tips into anger, grief, or astonishment isn’t enlightened. They’re insulated.