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Is it not strange that mankind should so willingly battle for religion and so unwillingly live according to its precepts?

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
Live
Unwillingly
Precepts
Willingly
According
Battle
Mankind
Strange
Religion

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The feeling of health can only be gained by sickness.
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What concerns me alone I only think, what concerns my friends I tell them, what can be of interest to only a limited public I write, and what the world ought to know is printed.
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It is almost impossible to carry the torch of truth through a crowd without singeing somebody's beard.
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One is rarely an impulsive innovator after the age of sixty, but one can still be a very fine orderly and inventive thinker. One rarely procreates children at that age, but one is all the more skilled at educating those who have already been procreated, and education is procreation of another kind.
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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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Just as the performance of the vilest and most wicked deeds requires spirit and talent, so even the greatest demand a certain insensitivity which under other circumstances we would call stupidity.
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A good metaphor is something even the police should keep an eye on.
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As I take up my pen I feel myself so full, so equal to my subject, and see my book so clearly before me in embryo, I would almost like to try to say it all in a single word.
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Marriage, in contrast to the flu, starts with a fever and ends with the chills.
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Never trust a man who lays his hand on his heart when he assures you of anything.
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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.
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I am grateful that I am not as judgmental as all those censorious, self-righteous people around me. In each of us there is a little of all of us.
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Love is blind, but marriage restores its sight.
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To see every day how people get the name 'genius' just as the wood-lice in the cellar the name 'millipede'-not because they have that many feet, but because most people don't want to count to 14-this has had the result that I don't believe anyone any more without checking.
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The most heated defenders of a science, who cannot endure the slightest sneer at it, are commonly those who have not made very much progress in it and are secretly aware of this defect.
Georg C. Lichtenberg
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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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There were honest people long before there were Christians and there are, God be praised, still honest people where there are no Christians. It could therefore easily be possible that people are Christians because true Christianity corresponds to what they would have been even if Christianity did not exist.
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Doubt everything at least once, even the sentence Two times two is four.
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Everyone should study at least enough philosophy and belles-lettres to make his sexual experience more delectable.
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It often takes more courage to change one's opinion than to stick to it.
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