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To live when you do not want to is dreadful, but it would be even more terrible to be immortal when you did not want to be. As things are, however, the whole ghastly burden is suspended from me by a thread which I can cut in two with a penny-knife.

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
Cutting
Pennies
Terrible
Dreadful
Two
Knife
Live
Knives
Whole
Thread
Even
Immortal
Ghastly
Things
Burden
Penny
Would
However
Suspended

More quotes by Georg C. Lichtenberg

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To be content with life or to live merrily, rather all that is required is that we bestow on all things only a fleeting, superficial glance the more thoughtful we become the more earnest we grow.
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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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One should never trust a person who, while assuring you of something, puts his hands on his heart.
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The drive to propagate our race has also propagated a lot of other things
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It is a great shame most of our words are misused tools / which often still smell of the mud in which previous owners / desecrated them.
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A good means to discovery is to take away certain parts of a system to find out how the rest behaves.
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.
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Universal morality is to be found in little everyday penny-events just as much as in great ones.
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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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Actual aristocracy cannot be abolished by any law: all the law can do is decree how it is to be imparted and who is to acquire it.
Georg C. Lichtenberg
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A book which, above all others in the world, should be forbidden, is a catalogue of forbidden books.
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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.
Georg C. Lichtenberg
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He who knows himself properly can very soon learn to know all other men. It is all reflection.
Georg C. Lichtenberg
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Never undertake anything for which you wouldn't have the courage to ask the blessings of heaven.
Georg C. Lichtenberg
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The greater part of human misery is caused by indolence.
Georg C. Lichtenberg
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If all mankind were suddenly to practice honesty, many thousands of people would be sure to starve.
Georg C. Lichtenberg
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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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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
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I would give something to know for whose sake precisely those deeds were really done which report says were done for the fatherland.
Georg C. Lichtenberg
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It is a dangerous thing for the perfecting of our minds to gain applause by works that do not call forth the whole of our energies for in that case one generally comes to a standstill.
Georg C. Lichtenberg