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
Popular presentation today is all too often that which puts the mob in a position to talk about something without understanding it.
No despotism is so formidable as that of a religion or a scientific system.
Man is perhaps half mind and half matter in the same way as the polyp is half plant and half animal. The strangest creatures are always found on the border lines of species.
How happily some people would live if they troubled themselves as little about other people's business as about their own.
The world is a body common to all men, changes to it bring about a change in the souls of all men who are turned towards that part of it at that moment.
The greatest things in the world are brought about by other things which we count as nothing: little causes we overlook but which at length accumulate.
The fear of death which is imprinted in men is at the same time a great expedient Heaven employs to hinder them from many misdeeds: many things are left undone for fear of imperiling one's life or health.
How few friends would remain friends if each could see the sentiments of the other in their entirety.
No people are more conceited than those who depict their own feelings, especially if they happen to have a little prose at their command for the occasion.
Where the frontier of science once was is now the centre.
What concerns me alone I only think, what concerns my friends I tell them, what can be of interest to only a limited public I write, and what the world ought to know is printed...
A good means to discovery is to take away certain parts of a system to find out how the rest behaves.
The motives that lead us to do anything might be arranged like the thirty-two winds and might be given names on the same pattern: for instance, "bread-bread-fame" or "fame-fame-bread.
There are two ways of extending life : firstly by moving the two points "born" and "died" farther away from one another... The other method is to go more slowly and leave the two points wherever God wills they should be, and this method is for the philosophers.