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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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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
Always
Beauty
Spite
Pleasure
Mathematical
Law
Math
True
Range
Nature
Mathematics
Give
Merely
Find
Laws
Suspect
Giving
Close
Suspects

More quotes by Georg C. Lichtenberg

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I look upon book reviews as an infantile disease which new-born books are subject to.
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In each of us there is a little of all of us.
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One use of dreams is that, unprejudiced by our often forced and artificial reflections, they represent the impartial outcome of our entire being.
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The man was such an intellectual he was of almost no use.
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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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One of the greatest and also the commonest of faults is for men to believe that, because they never hear their shortcomings spoken of, or read about them in cold print, others can have no knowledge of them.
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The Greeks possessed a knowledge of human nature we seem hardly able to attain to without passing through the strengthening hibernation of a new barbarism.
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Nowadays three witty turns of phrase and a lie make a writer.
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Never undertake anything unless you have the heart to ask Heaven's blessing on your undertaking.
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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.
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He who is in love with himself has at least this advantage - he won't encounter many rivals.
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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.
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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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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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He who knows himself properly can very soon learn to know all other men. It is all reflection.
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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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It is almost everywhere the case that soon after it is begotten the greater part of human wisdom is laid to rest in repositories.
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We have no words for speaking of wisdom to the stupid. He who understands the wise is wise already.
Georg C. Lichtenberg
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Every condition of the soul has its own sign and expression...So you will see how hard it is to seem original without being so.
Georg C. Lichtenberg
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Universal morality is to be found in little everyday penny-events just as much as in great ones.
Georg C. Lichtenberg