“There are very many people who read simply to prevent themselves from thinking.”

— Georg Christoph Lichtenberg

G 29
Aphorisms (1765-1799), Notebook G (1779-1783)

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Do you have more details about the quote "There are very many people who read simply to prevent themselves from thinking." by Georg Christoph Lichtenberg?

Georg Christoph Lichtenberg 137

German scientist, satirist 1742–1799

Susanna Kaysen book Girl, Interrupted

Variant: I think many people kill themselves simply to stop the debate about whether they will or they won't.
Source: Girl, Interrupted

“People who think they can control their negative emotions and manifest them when they want to, simply deceive themselves.”

P. D. Ouspensky (1878–1947) Russian esotericist

Fourth Lecture, p. 70.
The Psychology of Man's Possible Evolution (1950)
Context: People who think they can control their negative emotions and manifest them when they want to, simply deceive themselves. Negative emotions depend on identification; if identification is destroyed in some particular case, they disappear. The strangest and most fantastic fact about negative emotions is that people actually worship them. I think that, for an ordinary mechanical man, the most difficult thing to realise is that his own and other people's negative emotions, have no value whatever and do not contain anything noble, anything beautiful or anything strong. In reality negative emotions contain nothing but weakness and very often the beginning of hysteria, insanity or crime. The only good thing about them is that, being quite useless and artificially created by imagination and identification, they can be destroyed without any loss. And this is the only chance of escape that man has.