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
Man is to be found in reason, God in the passions.
Man can acquire accomplishments or he can become an animal, whichever he wants. God makes the animals, man makes himself.
To err is human also in so far as animals seldom or never err, or at least only the cleverest of them do so.
I have often noticed that when people come to understand a mathematical proposition in some other way than that of the ordinary demonstration, they promptly say, "Oh, I see. That's how it must be." This is a sign that they explain it to themselves from within their own system.
To grow wiser means to learn to know better and better the faults to which this instrument with which we feel and judge can be subject.
He was always smoothing and polishing himself, and in the end he became blunt before he was sharp.
Nothing puts a greater obstacle in the way of the progress of knowledge than thinking that one knows what one does not yet know.
A schoolteacher or professor cannot educate individuals, he educates only species.
Those who never have time do least
We now possess four principles of morality: 1) a philosophical: do good for its own sake, out of respect for the law; 2) a religious: do good because it is God's will, out of love of God; 3) a human: do good because it will promote your happiness, out of self-love; 4) a political: do good because it will promote the welfare of the society of which you are a part, out of love of society having regard to yourself. But is this not all one single principle, only viewed from different sides?
We can see nothing whatever of the soul unless it is visible in the expression of the countenance; one might call the faces at a large assembly of people a history of the human soul written in a kind of Chinese ideograms.
If an angel were to tell us about his philosophy, I believe many of his statements might well sound like '2 x 2= 13'.
If we make a couple of discoveries here and there we need not believe things will go on like this for ever. Just as we hit water when we dig in the earth, so we discover the incomprehensible sooner or later.
The construction of the universe is certainly very much easier to explain than is that of the plant.