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

More quotes by Georg C. Lichtenberg

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Never undertake anything unless you have the heart to ask Heaven's blessing on your undertaking.
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A good means to discovery is to take away certain parts of a system to find out how the rest behaves.
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What most clearly characterizes true freedom and its true employment is its misemployment.
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Virtue by premeditation isn't worth much.
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It is astonishing how much the word infinitely is misused: everything is infinitely more beautiful, infinitely better, etc. The concept must have something pleasing about it, or its misuse could not have become so general.
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.
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Diogenes, filthily attired, paced across the splendid carpets in Plato's dwelling. Thus, said he, do I trample on the pride of Plato. Yes, Plato replied, but only with another kind of pride.
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A book which, above all others in the world, should be forbidden, is a catalogue of forbidden books.
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The journalists have constructed for themselves a little wooden chapel, which they also call the Temple of Fame, in which they put up and take down portraits all day long and make such a hammering you can't hear yourself speak.
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I would give something to know for whose sake precisely those deeds were really done which report says were done for the fatherland.
Georg C. Lichtenberg
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The American who first discovered Columbus made a bad discovery.
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.
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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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One of our forefathers must have read a forbidden book.
Georg C. Lichtenberg
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We judge nothing so hastily as character, and yet there is nothing over which we should be more cautious.... I have always found that the so-called bad people improve on closer acquaintance, while the good fall off.
Georg C. Lichtenberg
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A clever child brought up with a foolish one can itself become foolish. Man is so perfectible and corruptible he can become a fool through good sense.
Georg C. Lichtenberg
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To be content with life or to live merrily, rather all that is required is that we bestow on all things only a fleeting, superficial glance the more thoughtful we become the more earnest we grow.
Georg C. Lichtenberg
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A person reveals his character by nothing so clearly as the joke he resents.
Georg C. Lichtenberg
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There are people who possess not so much genius as a certain talent for perceiving the desires of the century, or even of the decade, before it has done so itself.
Georg C. Lichtenberg
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Pain warns us not to exert our limbs to the point of breaking them. How much knowledge would we not need to recognize this by the exercise of mere reason.
Georg C. Lichtenberg