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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The American who first discovered Columbus made a bad discovery.
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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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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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The noble simplicity in the works of nature only too often originates in the noble shortsightedness of him who observes it.
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Men still have to be governed by deception.
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Sickness is mankind's greatest defect.
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Nowadays three witty turns of phrase and a lie make a writer.
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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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Here take back the stuff that I am, nature, knead it back into the dough of being, make of me a bush, a cloud, whatever you will, even a man, only no longer make me me.
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Virtue by premeditation isn't worth much.
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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.
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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 you are going to build something in the air it is always better to build castles than houses of cards.
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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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One might call habit a moral friction: something that prevents the mind from gliding over things but connects it with them and makes it hard for it to free itself from them.
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God created man in His own image, says the Bible; philosophers reverse the process: they create God in theirs.
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A handful of soldiers is always better than a mouthful of arguments.
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Even truth needs to be clad in new garments if it is to appeal to a new age.
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Doubt must be no more than vigilance, otherwise it can become dangerous.
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Perhaps in time the so-called Dark Ages will be thought of as including our own.
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Nothing can contribute more to peace of soul than the lack of any opinion whatever.
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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.
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With a pen in my hand I have successfully stormed bulwarks from which others armed with sword and excommunication have been repulsed.