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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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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
Away
Certain
Behaves
Find
Behave
Take
Parts
Mean
Discovery
Good
Rest
System
Means

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Prejudices are so to speak the mechanical instincts of men: through their prejudices they do without any effort many things they would find too difficult to think through to the point of resolving to do them.
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The great rule: If the little bit you have is nothing special in itself, at least find a way of saying it that is a little bit special.
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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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The Greeks possessed a knowledge of human nature we seem hardly able to attain to without passing through the strengthening hibernation of a new barbarism.
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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.
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To make astute people believe one is what one is not is, in most cases, harder than actually to become what one wishes to appear.
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The ordinary man is ruined by the flesh lusting against the spirit the scholar by the spirit lusting too much against the flesh.
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After all, is our idea of God anything more than personified incomprehensibility?
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Man…who lives in three places – in the past, in the present, and in the future – can be unhappy if one of these three is worthless. Religion has even added a fourth – eternity.
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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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A man has virtues enough if he deserves pardon for his faults on account of them.
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A handful of soldiers is always better than a mouthful of arguments.
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The most successful tempters and thus the most dangerous are the deluded deluders.
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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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How happily some people would live if they troubled themselves as little about other people's business as about their own.
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A good part of the fame of most celebrated men is due to the shortsightedness of their admirers
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The greater part of human misery is caused by indolence.
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A man is never more serious than when he praise himself.
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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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Be wary of passing the judgment: obscure. To find something obscure poses no difficult, elephants and poodles find many things obscure.
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