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
Ambition and suspicion always go together.
What most clearly characterizes true freedom and its true employment is its misemployment.
I have remarked very clearly that I am often of one opinion when I am lying down and of another when I am standing up...
There are people who possess not so much genius as a certain talent for perceiving the desires of the century, or even of the decade, before it has done so itself.
To make astute people believe one is what one is not is, in most cases, harder than actually to become what one wishes to appear.
The worst thing you can possibly do is worrying and thinking about what you could have done.
He who is enamored of himself will at least have the advantage of being inconvenienced by few rivals.
If there were only turnips and potatoes in the world, someone would complain that plants grow the wrong way.
It often takes more courage to change one's opinion than to stick to it.
To see every day how people get the name 'genius' just as the wood-lice in the cellar the name 'millipede'-not because they have that many feet, but because most people don't want to count to 14-this has had the result that I don't believe anyone any more without checking.
I forget most of what I read, just as I do most of what I have eaten, but I know that both contribute no less to the conservation of my mind and my body on that account.
Honest unaffected distrust of human abilities under all circumstances is the surest sign of strength of mind.
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.
We say that someone occupies an official position, whereas it is the official position that occupies him.