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The celebrated painter Gainsborough got as much pleasure from seeing violins as from hearing them.

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
Painter
Hearing
Seeing
Pleasure
Art
Much
Violins
Celebrated
Violin

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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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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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A man always writes absolutely well whenever he writes in his own manner, but the wigmaker who tries to write like Gellert ... writes badly.
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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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A man has virtues enough if he deserves pardon for his faults on account of them.
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Man…who lives in three places – in the past, in the present, and in the future – can be unhappy if one of these three is worthless. Religion has even added a fourth – eternity.
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.
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Never undertake anything unless you have the heart to ask Heaven's blessing on your undertaking.
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Be wary of passing the judgment: obscure. To find something obscure poses no difficult, elephants and poodles find many things obscure.
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There are very many people who read simply to prevent themselves from thinking.
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Ideas too are a life and a world.
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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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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.
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Erudition can produce foliage without bearing fruit.
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What you have been obliged to discover by yourself leaves a path in your mind which you can use again when the need arises.
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The American who first discovered Columbus made a bad discovery.
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There is something in our minds like sunshine and the weather, which is not under our control. When I write, the best things come to me from I know not where.
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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How happily some people would live if they troubled themselves as little about other people's business as about their own.
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We have to believe that everything has a cause, as the spider spins its web in order to catch flies. But it does this before it knows there are such things as flies.
Georg C. Lichtenberg