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We say that someone occupies an official position, whereas it is the official position that occupies him.

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
Position
Someone
Occupies
Official
Whereas
Officials
Sea

More quotes by Georg C. Lichtenberg

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The most dangerous untruths are truths slightly distorted.
Georg C. Lichtenberg
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There are two ways of extending life: firstly by moving the two points born and died farther away from one another. The other method is to go more slowly and leave the two points wherever God wills they should be, and this method is for the philosophers.
Georg C. Lichtenberg
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Nothing reveals a man's character better than the kind of joke at which he takes offense.
Georg C. Lichtenberg
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It is in the gift for employing all the vicissitudes of life to one's own advantage and to that of one's craft that a large part of genius consists.
Georg C. Lichtenberg
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I look upon book reviews as an infantile disease which new-born books are subject to.
Georg C. Lichtenberg
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The greater part of human misery is caused by indolence.
Georg C. Lichtenberg
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Prejudices are so to speak the mechanical instincts of men: through their prejudices they do without any effort many things they would find too difficult to think through to the point of resolving to do them.
Georg C. Lichtenberg
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One is rarely an impulsive innovator after the age of sixty, but one can still be a very fine orderly and inventive thinker. One rarely procreates children at that age, but one is all the more skilled at educating those who have already been procreated, and education is procreation of another kind.
Georg C. Lichtenberg
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There can hardly be a stranger commodity in the world than books. Printed by people who don't understand them sold by people who don't understand them bound, criticized and read by people who don't understand them and now even written by people who don't understand them.
Georg C. Lichtenberg
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The most heated defenders of a science, who cannot endure the slightest sneer at it, are commonly those who have not made very much progress in it and are secretly aware of this defect.
Georg C. Lichtenberg
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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.
Georg C. Lichtenberg
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Even truth needs to be clad in new garments if it is to appeal to a new age.
Georg C. Lichtenberg
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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.
Georg C. Lichtenberg
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I am grateful that I am not as judgmental as all those censorious, self-righteous people around me. In each of us there is a little of all of us.
Georg C. Lichtenberg
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The Greeks possessed a knowledge of human nature we seem hardly able to attain to without passing through the strengthening hibernation of a new barbarism.
Georg C. Lichtenberg
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Nothing makes one old so quickly as the ever-present thought that one is growing older.
Georg C. Lichtenberg
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Those who never have time do least
Georg C. Lichtenberg
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One's first step in wisdom is to question everything - and one's last is to come to terms with everything.
Georg C. Lichtenberg
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To grow wiser means to learn to know better and better the faults to which this instrument with which we feel and judge can be subject.
Georg C. Lichtenberg
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A man always writes absolutely well whenever he writes in his own manner, but the wigmaker who tries to write like Gellert ... writes badly.
Georg C. Lichtenberg