Georg C. Lichtenberg
Georg C. Lichtenberg
Georg Christoph Lichtenbergwas a German scientist, satirist, and Anglophile. As a scientist, he was the first to hold a professorship explicitly dedicated to experimental physics in Germany. Today, he is remembered for his posthumously published notebooks, which he himself called Sudelbücher, a description modelled on the English bookkeeping term "scrapbooks", and for his discovery of the strange tree-like electrical discharge patterns now called Lichtenberg figures...
NationalityGerman
ProfessionScientist
Date of Birth1 July 1742
CountryGermany
So-called professional mathematicians have, in their reliance on the relative incapacity of the rest of mankind, acquired for themselves a reputation for profundity very similar to the reputation for sanctity possessed by theologians.
If it were true what in the end would be gained Nothing but another truth. Is this such a mighty advantage We have enough old truths still to digest, and even these we would be quite unable to endure if we did not sometimes flavor them with lies.
Man is a masterpiece of creation . . .
All mathematical laws which we find in Nature are always suspect to me, in spite of their beauty. They give me no pleasure. They are merely auxiliaries. At close range it is all not true.
We are obliged to regard many of our original minds as crazy at least until we have become as clever as they are.
He swallowed a lot of wisdom, but all of it seems to have gone down the wrong way.
What a blessing it would be if we could open and shut our ears...as easily as we open and shut our eyes.
Deliberate virtue is never worth much: The virtue of feeling or habit is the thing.
In each of us there is a little of all of us.
Man is a masterpiece of creation, if only because no amount of determinism can prevent him from believing that he acts as a free being.
If we thought more for ourselves we would have very many more bad books and very many more good ones.
One cannot demand of a scholar that he show himself a scholar everywhere in society, but the whole tenor of his behavior must none the less betray the thinker, he must always be instructive, his way of judging a thing must even in the smallest matters be such that people can see what it will amount to when, quietly and self-collected, he puts this power to scholarly use.
The noble simplicity in the works of nature only too often originates in the noble shortsightedness of him who observes it.
Reason now gazes above the realm of the dark but warm feelings as the Alpine peaks do above the clouds. They behold the sun more clearly and distinctly, but they are cold and unfruitful.