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It is a question whether, when we break a murderer on the wheel, we do not fall into the error a child makes when it hits the chair it has bumped into.

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
Child
Chair
Whether
Chairs
Fall
Wheels
Makes
Error
Children
Errors
Bumped
Murder
Murderer
Question
Hits
Break
Wheel

More quotes by Georg C. Lichtenberg

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A man has virtues enough if he deserves pardon for his faults on account of them.
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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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Just as we outgrow a pair of trousers, we outgrow acquaintances, libraries, principles, etc., at times before they're worn out and times - and this is the worst of all - before we have new ones.
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The most successful tempters and thus the most dangerous are the deluded deluders.
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One of the greatest and also the commonest of faults is for men to believe that, because they never hear their shortcomings spoken of, or read about them in cold print, others can have no knowledge of them.
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No despotism is so formidable as that of a religion or a scientific system.
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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Never undertake anything unless you have the heart to ask Heaven's blessing on your undertaking.
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People who never have any time on their hands are those who do the least.
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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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The noble simplicity in the works of nature only too often originates in the noble shortsightedness of him who observes it.
Georg C. Lichtenberg
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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.
Georg C. Lichtenberg
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After all, is our idea of God anything more than personified incomprehensibility?
Georg C. Lichtenberg
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I am always grieved when a man of real talent dies. The world needs such men more than Heaven does.
Georg C. Lichtenberg
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One of the greatest creations of the human mind is the art of reviewing books without having read them.
Georg C. Lichtenberg
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As I take up my pen I feel myself so full, so equal to my subject, and see my book so clearly before me in embryo, I would almost like to try to say it all in a single word.
Georg C. Lichtenberg
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To do the opposite of something is also a form of imitation, namely an imitation of its opposite.
Georg C. Lichtenberg
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A book is a mirror: if an ape looks into it an apostle is hardly likely to look out.
Georg C. Lichtenberg
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There exists a species of transcendental ventriloquism by means of which men can be made to believe that something said on earth comes from Heaven.
Georg C. Lichtenberg
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One use of dreams is that, unprejudiced by our often forced and artificial reflections, they represent the impartial outcome of our entire being.
Georg C. Lichtenberg