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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.
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
Given
Thirty
Two
Instance
Anything
Patterns
Might
Bread
Arranged
Like
Fame
Motives
Lead
Winds
Wind
Pattern
Names
Motive
More quotes by Georg C. Lichtenberg
I am confident of my ability to demonstrate that one can sometimes believe in something and yet not believe in it. Nothing is less fathomable than the systems that motivate our actions.
Georg C. Lichtenberg
The ordinary man is ruined by the flesh lusting against the spirit the scholar by the spirit lusting too much against the flesh.
Georg C. Lichtenberg
What we are able to judge with feeling is very little the rest is all prejudice and complaisance.
Georg C. Lichtenberg
If this is philosophy it is at any rate a philosophy that is not in its right mind.
Georg C. Lichtenberg
It is too bad if you have to do everything upon reflection and can't do anything from early habit.
Georg C. Lichtenberg
Man loves company - even if it is only that of a small burning candle.
Georg C. Lichtenberg
As nations improve, so do their gods.
Georg C. Lichtenberg
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
How happily some people would live if they troubled themselves as little about other people's business as about their own.
Georg C. Lichtenberg
Just as we outgrow a pair of trousers, we outgrow acquaintances, libraries, principles, etc., at times before they're worn out and times - and this is the worst of all - before we have new ones.
Georg C. Lichtenberg
The excuses we make to ourselves when we want to do something are excellent material for soliloquies, for they are rarely made except when we are alone, and are very often made aloud.
Georg C. Lichtenberg
Marriage, in contrast to the flu, starts with a fever and ends with the chills.
Georg C. Lichtenberg
Affectation is a very good word when someone does not wish to confess to what he would none the less like to believe of himself.
Georg C. Lichtenberg
Man is so perfectable and corruptible he can become a fool through good sense.
Georg C. Lichtenberg
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.
Georg C. Lichtenberg
The great trick of regarding small departures from the truth as the truth itself - on which is founded the entire integral calculus - is also the basis of our witty speculations, where the whole thing would often collapse if we considered the departures with philosophical rigour.
Georg C. Lichtenberg
A man always writes absolutely well whenever he writes in his own manner, but the wigmaker who tries to write like Gellert ... writes badly.
Georg C. Lichtenberg
They do not think, therefore they are not.
Georg C. Lichtenberg
Ideas too are a life and a world.
Georg C. Lichtenberg
Delicacy in woman is strength.
Georg C. Lichtenberg