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 can hardly be a stranger commodity in the world than books. Printed by people who don't understand them; sold by people who don't understand them; bound, criticized and read by people who don't understand them; and now even written by people who don't understand them.
The course of the seasons is a piece of clockwork, with a cuckoo to call when it is spring.
Be attentive, feel nothing in vain, measure and compare: this is the whole law of philosophy.
Do not judge God's world from your own. Trim your own hedge as you wish and plant your flowers in the patterns you can understand, but do not judge the garden of nature from your little window box.
Barbaric accuracy - whimpering humility.
Most men of education are more superstitious than they admit - nay, than they think.
Bad writers are those who try to express their own feeble ideas in the language of good ones.
One should never trust a person who, while assuring you of something, puts his hands on his heart.
There are people who can believe anything they wish. What lucky creatures!
The ordinary man is ruined by the flesh lusting against the spirit; the scholar by the spirit lusting too much against the flesh.
What we have to discover for ourselves leaves behind in our mind a pathway that can be used on another occasion.
Imagine the world so greatly magnified that particles of light look like twenty-four-pound cannon balls.
What you have been obliged to discover by yourself leaves a path in your mind which you can use again when the need arises.
He marvelled at the fact that the cats had two holes cut in their fur at precisely the spot where their eyes were.