Quote

Here take back the stuff that I am, nature, knead it back into the dough of being, make of me a bush, a cloud, whatever you will, even a man, only no longer make me.

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
Men
Longer
Whatever
Stuff
Dough
Nature
Suicidal
Back
Cloud
Take
Bush
Even
Suicide
Make
Clouds

More quotes by Georg C. Lichtenberg

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What we are able to judge with feeling is very little the rest is all prejudice and complaisance.
Georg C. Lichtenberg
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It is a dangerous thing for the perfecting of our minds to gain applause by works that do not call forth the whole of our energies for in that case one generally comes to a standstill.
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The fruits of philosophy are the important thing, not the philosophy itself. When we ask the time, we don't want to know how watches are made.
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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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What is called an acute knowledge of human nature is mostly nothing but the observer's own weaknesses reflected back from others.
Georg C. Lichtenberg
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Never undertake anything unless you have the heart to ask Heaven's blessing on your undertaking.
Georg C. Lichtenberg
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As soon as you know a man to be blind, you imagine that you can see it from his back.
Georg C. Lichtenberg
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Man is to be found in reason, God in the passions.
Georg C. Lichtenberg
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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.
Georg C. Lichtenberg
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The man was such an intellectual he was of almost no use.
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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Much reading has brought upon us a learned barbarism.
Georg C. Lichtenberg
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Just as the performance of the vilest and most wicked deeds requires spirit and talent, so even the greatest demand a certain insensitivity which under other circumstances we would call stupidity.
Georg C. Lichtenberg
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A good method of discovery is to imagine certain members of a system removed and then see how what is left would behave: for example, where would we be if iron were absent from the world: this is an old example.
Georg C. Lichtenberg
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The worst thing you can possibly do is worrying and thinking about what you could have done.
Georg C. Lichtenberg
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With a pen in my hand I have successfully stormed bulwarks from which others armed with sword and excommunication have been repulsed.
Georg C. Lichtenberg
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God created man in His own image, says the Bible philosophers reverse the process: they create God in theirs.
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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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.
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