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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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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
Book
Bound
Even
Hardly
World
Bounds
People
Stranger
Books
Criticized
Written
Printed
Read
Commodity
Understand
Sold

More quotes by 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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Man is a masterpiece of creation . . .
Georg C. Lichtenberg
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To read means to borrow to create out of one s readings is paying off one's debts.
Georg C. Lichtenberg
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They do not think, therefore they are not.
Georg C. Lichtenberg
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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.
Georg C. Lichtenberg
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A book is a mirror: if an ape looks into it an apostle is hardly likely to look out.
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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Never trust a man who lays his hand on his heart when he assures you of anything.
Georg C. Lichtenberg
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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
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Before one blames, one should always find out whether one cannot excuse.
Georg C. Lichtenberg
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The noble simplicity in the works of nature only too often originates in the noble shortsightedness of him who observes it.
Georg C. Lichtenberg
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One has to do something new in order to see something new.
Georg C. Lichtenberg
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I made the journey to knowledge like dogs who go for walks with their masters, a hundred times forward and backward over the same territory and when I arrived I was tired.
Georg C. Lichtenberg
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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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If all else fails, the character of a man can be recognized by nothing so surely as by a jest which he takes badly.
Georg C. Lichtenberg
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A vacuum of ideas affects people differently than a vacuum of air, otherwise readers of books would be constantly collapsing.
Georg C. Lichtenberg
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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.
Georg C. Lichtenberg
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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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What we are able to judge with feeling is very little the rest is all prejudice and complaisance.
Georg C. Lichtenberg
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A good part of the fame of most celebrated men is due to the shortsightedness of their admirers
Georg C. Lichtenberg