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
The most perfect ape cannot draw an ape; only man can do that; but, likewise, only man regards the ability to do this as a sign of superiority.
Good taste is either that which agrees with my taste or that which subjects itself to the rule of reason. From this we can see how useful it is to employ reason in seeking out the laws of taste.
The fly that doesn't want to be swatted is most secure when it lights on the fly-swatter.
Nothing makes one old so quickly as the ever-present thought that one is growing older.
Virtue by premeditation isn't worth much.
Reading means borrowing.
To many people virtue consists chiefly in repenting faults, not in avoiding them.
The writer who cannot sometimes throw away a thought about which another man would have written dissertations, without worry whether or not the reader will find it, will never become a great writer.
It is a question whether, when we break a murderer on the wheel, we do not fall into the error a child makes when it hits the chair it has bumped into.
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.
It is almost impossible to carry the torch of truth through a crowd without singeing somebody's beard.
You believe I run after the strange because I do not know the beautiful; no, it is because you do not know the beautiful that I seek the strange.
Whenever he composes a critical review, I have been told, he gets an enormous erection.
One's first step in wisdom is to question everything - and one's last is to come to terms with everything.