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

More quotes by 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.
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In each of us there is a little of all of us.
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One of the greatest and also the commonest of faults is for men to believe that, because they never hear their shortcomings spoken of, or read about them in cold print, others can have no knowledge of them.
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I forget the greater part of what I read, but all the same it nourishes my mind.
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The worst thing you can possibly do is worrying and thinking about what you could have done.
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I am always grieved when a man of real talent dies. The world needs such men more than Heaven does.
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There is no more important rule of conduct in the world than this: attach yourself as much as you can to people who are abler than you and yet not so very different that you cannot understand them.
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I look upon book reviews as an infantile disease which new-born books are subject to.
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We are obliged to regard many of our original minds as crazy at least until we have become as clever as they are.
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If this is philosophy it is at any rate a philosophy that is not in its right mind.
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A clever child brought up with a foolish one can itself become foolish. Man is so perfectible and corruptible he can become a fool through good sense.
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It is certainly not a matter of indifference whether I learn something without effort or finally arrive at it myself through my system of thought. In the latter case everything has roots, in the former it is merely superficial.
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The most successful tempters and thus the most dangerous are the deluded deluders.
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The drive to propagate our race has also propagated a lot of other things
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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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Man is a masterpiece of creation . . .
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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.
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We have no words for speaking of wisdom to the stupid. He who understands the wise is wise already.
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Those who never have time do least
Georg C. Lichtenberg
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There are very many people who read simply to prevent themselves from thinking.
Georg C. Lichtenberg