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
We judge nothing so hastily as character, and yet there is nothing over which we should be more cautious.... I have always found that the so-called bad people improve on closer acquaintance, while the good fall off.
Universal morality is to be found in little everyday penny-events just as much as in great ones.
One of the greatest and also the commonest of faults is for men to believe that, because they never hear their shortcomings spoken of, or read about them in cold print, others can have no knowledge of them.
If it is permissible to write plays that are not intended to be seen, I should like to see who can prevent me from writing a book no one can read.
Is it not strange that mankind should so willingly battle for religion and so unwillingly live according to its precepts?
Man is so perfectable and corruptible he can become a fool through good sense.
Everyone who has ever written will have discovered that writing always awakens something which, though it lay within us, we failed clearly to recognize before.
One use of dreams is that, unprejudiced by our often forced and artificial reflections, they represent the impartial outcome of our entire being.
Do not commence your exercises in philosophy in those regions where an error can deliver you over to the executioner.
What I do not like about our definitions of genius is that there is in them nothing of the day of judgment, nothing of resounding through eternity and nothing of the footsteps of the Almighty.
We often have need of a profound philosophy to restore to our feelings their original state of innocence, to find our way out of the rubble of things alien to us, to begin to feel for ourselves and to speak ourselves, and I might almost say to exist ourselves.
Man is always partial and is quite right to be. Even impartiality is partial.
It is said that truth comes from the mouths of fools and children: I wish every good mind which feels an inclination for satire would reflect that the finest satirist always has something of both in him.
A man is never more serious than when he praise himself.