Georg C. Lichtenberg Quotes
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We accumulate our opinions at an age when our understanding is at its weakest.
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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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If people should ever start to do only what is necessary millions would die of hunger.
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Erudition can produce foliage without bearing fruit.
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What is the good of drawing conclusions from experience? I don't deny we sometimes draw the right conclusions, but don't we just as often draw the wrong ones?
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There exists a species of transcendental ventriloquism by means of which men can be made to believe that something said on earth comes from Heaven.
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What is called an acute knowledge of human nature is mostly nothing but the observer's own weaknesses reflected back from others.
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I am convinced we do not only love ourselves in others but hate ourselves in others too.
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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.
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To receive applause for works which do not demand all our powers hinders our advance towards a perfecting of our spirit. It usually means that thereafter we stand still.
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Many things about our bodies would not seem to us so filthy and obscene if we did not have the idea of nobility in our heads.
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He who is in love with himself has at least this advantage - he won't encounter many rivals.
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The human tendency to regard little things as important has produced very many great things.
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Man loves company - even if it is only that of a small burning candle.
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Nothing makes one old so quickly as the ever-present thought that one is growing older.
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The fly that doesn't want to be swatted is most secure when it lights on the fly-swatter.
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Just as the performance of the vilest and most wicked deeds requires spirit and talent, so even the greatest demand a certain insensitivity which under other circumstances we would call stupidity.
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With prophecies the commentator is often a more important man than the prophet.
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To do the opposite of something is also a form of imitation, namely an imitation of its opposite.
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He who says he hates every kind of flattery, and says it in earnest, certainly does not yet know every kind of flattery.
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That man is the noblest creature may also be inferred from the fact that no other creature has yet contested this claim.
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Men still have to be governed by deception.
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The American who first discovered Columbus made a bad discovery.
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Every man has his moral backside which he refrains from showing unless he has to and keeps covered as long as possible with the trousers of decorum.