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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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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
After all, is our idea of God anything more than personified incomprehensibility?
Georg C. Lichtenberg
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
Man is so perfectable and corruptible he can become a fool through good sense.
Georg C. Lichtenberg
If another Messiah was born he could hardly do so much good as the printing-press.
Georg C. Lichtenberg
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.
Georg C. Lichtenberg
A man is never more serious than when he praise himself.
Georg C. Lichtenberg
God created man in His own image, says the Bible philosophers reverse the process: they create God in theirs.
Georg C. Lichtenberg
The greater part of human misery is caused by indolence.
Georg C. Lichtenberg
The celebrated painter Gainsborough got as much pleasure from seeing violins as from hearing them.
Georg C. Lichtenberg
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
The world is a body common to all men, changes to it bring about a change in the souls of all men who are turned towards that part of it at that moment.
Georg C. Lichtenberg
The highest level than can be reached by a mediocre but experienced mind is a talent for uncovering the weaknesses of those greater than itself.
Georg C. Lichtenberg
If you are going to build something in the air it is always better to build castles than houses of cards.
Georg C. Lichtenberg
The fly that doesn't want to be swatted is most secure when it lights on the fly-swatter.
Georg C. Lichtenberg
If it were true what in the end would be gained? Nothing but another truth. Is this such a mighty advantage? We have enough old truths still to digest, and even these we would be quite unable to endure if we did not sometimes flavor them with lies.
Georg C. Lichtenberg
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.
Georg C. Lichtenberg
The rules of grammar are mere human statutes, which is why when he speaks out of the possessed the Devil himself speaks bad Latin.
Georg C. Lichtenberg
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
Erudition can produce foliage without bearing fruit.
Georg C. Lichtenberg
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.
Georg C. Lichtenberg
