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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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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
Often
Nature
Shortsightedness
Originates
Observes
Simplicity
Noble
Works

More quotes by Georg C. Lichtenberg

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Actual aristocracy cannot be abolished by any law: all the law can do is decree how it is to be imparted and who is to acquire it.
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.
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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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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As nations improve, so do their gods.
Georg C. Lichtenberg
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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
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Man is so perfectable and corruptible he can become a fool through good sense.
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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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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The course of the seasons is a piece of clockwork, with a cuckoo to call when it is spring.
Georg C. Lichtenberg
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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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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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Delicacy in woman is strength.
Georg C. Lichtenberg
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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.
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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He who knows himself properly can very soon learn to know all other men. It is all reflection.
Georg C. Lichtenberg
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A vacuum of ideas affects people differently than a vacuum of air, otherwise readers of books would be constantly collapsing.
Georg C. Lichtenberg
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The ordinary man is ruined by the flesh lusting against the spirit the scholar by the spirit lusting too much against the flesh.
Georg C. Lichtenberg
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There can hardly be a stranger commodity in the world than books. Printed by people who don't understand them sold by people who don't understand them bound, criticized and read by people who don't understand them and now even written by people who don't understand them.
Georg C. Lichtenberg
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Before one blames, one should always find out whether one cannot excuse. To discover little faults has been always the particularity of such brains that are a little or not at all above the average. The superior ones keep quiet or say something against the whole and the great minds transform without blaming.
Georg C. Lichtenberg