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
A book which, above all others in the world, should be forbidden, is a catalogue of forbidden books.
Libraries can in general be too narrow or too wide for the soul.
A vacuum of ideas affects people differently than a vacuum of air, otherwise readers of books would be constantly collapsing.
You can make a good living from soothsaying but not from truthsaying.
Some people read only because they are too lazy to think.
As soon as you know a man to be blind, you imagine that you can see it from his back.
It is almost everywhere the case that soon after it is begotten the greater part of human wisdom is laid to rest in repositories.
There is no greater impediment to progress in the sciences than the desire to see it take place too quickly.
The greater part of human misery is caused by indolence.
The great trick of regarding small departures from the truth as the truth itself - on which is founded the entire integral calculus - is also the basis of our witty speculations, where the whole thing would often collapse if we considered the departures with philosophical rigour.
With God thoughts are colors, with us they are pigments-even the most abstract one may be accompanied by physical pain.
People who have read a good deal rarely make great discoveries. I do not say this in excuse of laziness, but because invention presupposes an extensive independent contemplation of things.
Pain warns us not to exert our limbs to the point of breaking them. How much knowledge would we not need to recognize this by the exercise of mere reason.
Doubt everything at least once, even the sentence "Two times two is four."