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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
Break
Wheel
Child
Chair
Whether
Chairs
Fall
Wheels
Makes
Error
Children
Errors
Bumped
Murder
Murderer
Question
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More quotes by Georg C. Lichtenberg

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That man is the noblest creature may also be inferred from the fact that no other creature has yet contested this claim.
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In each of us there is a little of all of us.
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The greatest things in the world are brought about by other things which we count as nothing: little causes we overlook but which at length accumulate.
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Is it not strange that mankind should so willingly battle for religion and so unwillingly live according to its precepts?
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They do not think, therefore they are not.
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Astronomy is perhaps the science whose discoveries owe least to chance, in which human understanding appears in its whole magnitude, and through which man can best learn how small he is.
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It is too bad if you have to do everything upon reflection and can't do anything from early habit.
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It is a great shame most of our words are misused tools / which often still smell of the mud in which previous owners / desecrated them.
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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.
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If all mankind were suddenly to practice honesty, many thousands of people would be sure to starve.
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Ideas too are a life and a world.
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Man is perhaps half mind and half matter in the same way as the polyp is half plant and half animal. The strangest creatures are always found on the border lines of species.
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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.
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It is astonishing how much the word infinitely is misused: everything is infinitely more beautiful, infinitely better, etc. The concept must have something pleasing about it, or its misuse could not have become so general.
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The feeling of health can only be gained by sickness.
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A vacuum of ideas affects people differently than a vacuum of air, otherwise readers of books would be constantly collapsing.
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The greater part of human misery is caused by indolence.
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The journalists have constructed for themselves a little wooden chapel, which they also call the Temple of Fame, in which they put up and take down portraits all day long and make such a hammering you can't hear yourself speak.
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Nothing is more conducive to peace of mind than not having any opinion at all.
Georg C. Lichtenberg
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There were honest people long before there were Christians and there are, God be praised, still honest people where there are no Christians. It could therefore easily be possible that people are Christians because true Christianity corresponds to what they would have been even if Christianity did not exist.
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