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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
Strange
Religion
Live
Unwillingly
Precepts
Willingly
According
Battle
Mankind

More quotes by Georg C. Lichtenberg

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Man is to be found in reason, God in the passions.
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Nothing is more conducive to peace of mind than not having any opinion at all.
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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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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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No despotism is so formidable as that of a religion or a scientific system.
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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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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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Reason now gazes above the realm of the dark but warm feelings as the Alpine peaks do above the clouds. They behold the sun more clearly and distinctly, but they are cold and unfruitful.
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An hour-glass is a reminder not only of time's quick flight, but also of the dust to which we must at last return
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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.
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Nothing reveals a man's character better than the kind of joke at which he takes offense.
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If all else fails, the character of a man can be recognized by nothing so surely as by a jest which he takes badly.
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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.
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There are two ways of extending life: firstly by moving the two points born and died farther away from one another. The other method is to go more slowly and leave the two points wherever God wills they should be, and this method is for the philosophers.
Georg C. Lichtenberg
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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.
Georg C. Lichtenberg
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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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The man was such an intellectual he was of almost no use.
Georg C. Lichtenberg
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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.
Georg C. Lichtenberg
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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.
Georg C. Lichtenberg
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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.
Georg C. Lichtenberg