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
If people should ever start to do only what is necessary millions would die of hunger.
I am convinced we do not only love ourselves in others but hate ourselves in others too.
Even truth needs to be clad in new garments if it is to appeal to a new age.
The most dangerous untruths are truths slightly distorted.
I cannot say whether things will get better if we change; what I can say is they must change if they are to get better.
A book is a mirror: if an ape looks into it an apostle is hardly likely to look out.
Once we know our weaknesses they cease to do us any harm.
What we are able to judge with feeling is very little; the rest is all prejudice and complaisance.
The girl who reveals herself heart and soul to her friend reveals the secrets of the entire sex; for every girl is the guardian of the feminine mysteries.
He who understands the wise is wise already.
The excuses we make to ourselves when we want to do something are excellent material for soliloquies, for they are rarely made except when we are alone, and are very often made aloud.
If this is philosophy it is at any rate a philosophy that is not in its right mind.
I forget the greater part of what I read, but all the same it nourishes my mind.
I am always grieved when a man of real talent dies. The world needs such men more than Heaven does.