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The great trick of regarding small departures from the truth as the truth itself - on which is founded the entire integral calculus - is also the basis of our witty speculations, where the whole thing would often collapse if we considered the departures with philosophical rigour.

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
Thing
Mathematics
Witty
Calculus
Would
Entire
Tricks
Integral
Small
Mathematical
Departure
Often
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Regarding
Truth
Basis
Speculation
Also
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Founded
Departures
Whole
Bases
Trick
Rigour
Great
Considered
Collapse
Speculations

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God created man in His own image, says the Bible philosophers reverse the process: they create God in theirs.
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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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Much reading has brought upon us a learned barbarism.
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One of the greatest creations of the human mind is the art of reviewing books without having read them.
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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.
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Do not commence your exercises in philosophy in those regions where an error can deliver you over to the executioner.
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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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Why does a suppurating lung give so little warning and a sore on the finger so much?
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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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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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The girl who reveals herself heart and soul to her friend reveals the secrets of the entire sex for every girl is the guardian of the feminine mysteries.
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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.
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It is a question whether, when we break a murderer on the wheel, we do not fall into the error a child makes when it hits the chair it has bumped into.
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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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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What most clearly characterizes true freedom and its true employment is its misemployment.
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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.
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Even truth needs to be clad in new garments if it is to appeal to a new age.
Georg C. Lichtenberg
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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.
Georg C. Lichtenberg
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Doubt everything at least once, even the sentence Two times two is four.
Georg C. Lichtenberg