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Man is so perfectable and corruptible he can become a fool through good sense.

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
Fool
Sense
Become
Good
Men
Corruptible
Foolishness

More quotes by Georg C. Lichtenberg

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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.
Georg C. Lichtenberg
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No despotism is so formidable as that of a religion or a scientific system.
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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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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Be wary of passing the judgment: obscure. To find something obscure poses no difficult, elephants and poodles find many things obscure.
Georg C. Lichtenberg
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A good method of discovery is to imagine certain members of a system removed and then see how what is left would behave: for example, where would we be if iron were absent from the world: this is an old example.
Georg C. Lichtenberg
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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.
Georg C. Lichtenberg
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Every condition of the soul has its own sign and expression...So you will see how hard it is to seem original without being so.
Georg C. Lichtenberg
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Whenever he composes a critical review, I have been told, he gets an enormous erection.
Georg C. Lichtenberg
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Every man has his moral backside which he refrains from showing unless he has to and keeps covered as long as possible with the trousers of decorum.
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
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Ideas too are a life and a world.
Georg C. Lichtenberg
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There exists a species of transcendental ventriloquism by means of which men can be made to believe that something said on earth comes from Heaven.
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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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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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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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.
Georg C. Lichtenberg
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I ceased in the year 1764 to believe that one can convince one’s opponents with arguments printed in books. It is not to do that, therefore, that I have taken up my pen, but merely so as to annoy them, and to bestow strength and courage on those on our own side, and to make it known to the others that they have not convinced us.
Georg C. Lichtenberg
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The highest level than can be reached by a mediocre but experienced mind is a talent for uncovering the weaknesses of those greater than itself.
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