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The most dangerous untruths are truths slightly distorted.

Georg C. Lichtenberg

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Georg C. Lichtenberg
Age: 56 †
Born: 1742
Born: July 1
Died: 1799
Died: February 24
Astronomer
French Moralist
Mathematician
Philosopher
Physicist
Scientist
University Teacher
Writer
København
Untruth
Distorted
Slightly
Propaganda
Truths
Dangerous
Truth
Untruths

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Whenever he composes a critical review, I have been told, he gets an enormous erection.
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I am confident of my ability to demonstrate that one can sometimes believe in something and yet not believe in it. Nothing is less fathomable than the systems that motivate our actions.
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Why does a suppurating lung give so little warning and a sore on the finger so much?
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A good metaphor is something even the police should keep an eye on.
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Libraries can in general be too narrow or too wide for the soul.
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Before one blames, one should always find out whether one cannot excuse. To discover little faults has been always the particularity of such brains that are a little or not at all above the average. The superior ones keep quiet or say something against the whole and the great minds transform without blaming.
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Nothing is more conducive to peace of mind than not having any opinion at all.
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The American who first discovered Columbus made a bad discovery.
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It is almost everywhere the case that soon after it is begotten the greater part of human wisdom is laid to rest in repositories.
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The girl who reveals herself heart and soul to her friend reveals the secrets of the entire sex for every girl is the guardian of the feminine mysteries.
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He who knows himself properly can very soon learn to know all other men. It is all reflection.
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Those who have racked their brains to discover new proofs have perhaps been induced to do so by a compulsion they could not quite explain to themselves. Instead of giving us their new proofs they should have explained to us the motivation that constrained them to search for them.
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Virtue by premeditation isn't worth much.
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He who says he hates every kind of flattery, and says it in earnest, certainly does not yet know every kind of flattery.
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Pain warns us not to exert our limbs to the point of breaking them. How much knowledge would we not need to recognize this by the exercise of mere reason.
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Man is a masterpiece of creation . . .
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Here take back the stuff that I am, nature, knead it back into the dough of being, make of me a bush, a cloud, whatever you will, even a man, only no longer make me.
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To live when you do not want to is dreadful, but it would be even more terrible to be immortal when you did not want to be. As things are, however, the whole ghastly burden is suspended from me by a thread which I can cut in two with a penny-knife.
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What is called an acute knowledge of human nature is mostly nothing but the observer's own weaknesses reflected back from others.
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The fruits of philosophy are the important thing, not the philosophy itself. When we ask the time, we don't want to know how watches are made.
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