Quote

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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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
Less
Action
Motivate
Nothing
Demonstrate
Sometimes
Absurdity
Something
Confident
Believe
Systems
Actions
Ability

More quotes by Georg C. Lichtenberg

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To make astute people believe one is what one is not is, in most cases, harder than actually to become what one wishes to appear.
Georg C. Lichtenberg
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Reason now gazes above the realm of the dark but warm feelings as the Alpine peaks do above the clouds. They behold the sun more clearly and distinctly, but they are cold and unfruitful.
Georg C. Lichtenberg
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We have to believe that everything has a cause, as the spider spins its web in order to catch flies. But it does this before it knows there are such things as flies.
Georg C. Lichtenberg
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All mathematical laws which we find in Nature are always suspect to me, in spite of their beauty. They give me no pleasure. They are merely auxiliaries. At close range it is all not true.
Georg C. Lichtenberg
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Cautiousness in judgment is nowadays to be recommended to each and every one: if we gained only one incontestable truth every ten years from each of our philosophical writers the harvest we reaped would be sufficient.
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.
Georg C. Lichtenberg
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Many things about our bodies would not seem to us so filthy and obscene if we did not have the idea of nobility in our heads.
Georg C. Lichtenberg
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A handful of soldiers is always better than a mouthful of arguments.
Georg C. Lichtenberg
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Man is a masterpiece of creation, if only because no amount of determinism can prevent him from believing that he acts as a free being.
Georg C. Lichtenberg
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The motives that lead us to do anything might be arranged like the thirty-two winds and might be given names on the same pattern: for instance, bread-bread-fame or fame-fame-bread.
Georg C. Lichtenberg
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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.
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
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How happily some people would live if they troubled themselves as little about other people's business as about their own.
Georg C. Lichtenberg
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One of our forefathers must have read a forbidden book.
Georg C. Lichtenberg
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There is something in our minds like sunshine and the weather, which is not under our control. When I write, the best things come to me from I know not where.
Georg C. Lichtenberg
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Ideas too are a life and a world.
Georg C. Lichtenberg
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Libraries can in general be too narrow or too wide for the soul.
Georg C. Lichtenberg
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Propositions on which all men are in agreement are true: if they are not true we have no truth at all.
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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We say that someone occupies an official position, whereas it is the official position that occupies him.
Georg C. Lichtenberg