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
There are people who believe everything is sane and sensible that is done with a solemn face. ... It is no great art to say something briefly when, like Tacitus , one has something to say; when one has nothing to say, however, and none the less writes a whole book and makes truth ... into a liar that I call an achievement.
People nowadays have such high hopes of America and the political conditions obtaining there that one might say the desires, at least the secret desires, of all enlightened Europeans are deflected to the west, like our magnetic needles.
Those who have racked their brains to discover new proofs have perhaps been induced to do so by a compulsion they could not quite explain to themselves. Instead of giving us their new proofs they should have explained to us the motivation that constrained them to search for them.
A man has virtues enough if he deserves pardon for his faults on account of them.
Too much is unwholesome.
God creates the animals, man creates himself.
Delicacy in woman is strength.
Many a man who is willing to be shot for his belief in a miracle would have doubted, had he been present at the miracle itself.
As nations improve, so do their gods.
It not seldom happens that in the purposeless rovings and wanderings of the imagination we hunt down such game as can be put to use by our purposeful philosophy in its well-ordered household.
It is a sure evidence of a good book if it pleases us more and more as we grow older.
The highest point to which a weak but experienced mind can rise is detecting the weakness of better men.
If countries were named after the words you first hear when you go there, England would have to be called Damn It.
Cultivate that kind of knowledge which enables us to discover for ourselves in case of need that which others have to read or be told of.