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
Theologians always try to turn the Bible into a book without common sense.
Many things about our bodies would not seem to us so filthy and obscene if we did not have the idea of nobility in our heads.
Delight at having understood a very abstract and obscure system leads most people to believe in the truth of what it demonstrates.
Just as we outgrow a pair of trousers, we outgrow acquaintances, libraries, principles, etc., at times before they're worn out and times - and this is the worst of all - before we have new ones.
Nowadays three witty turns of phrase and a lie make a writer.
Nothing can contribute more to peace of soul than the lack of any opinion whatever.
If all mankind were suddenly to practice honesty, many thousands of people would be sure to starve
Astronomy is perhaps the science whose discoveries owe least to chance, in which human understanding appears in its whole magnitude, and through which man can best learn how small he is.
One must judge men not by their opinions, but by what their opinions have made of them.
Man loves company - even if it is only that of a small burning candle.
The sure conviction that we could if we wanted to is the reason so many good minds are idle.
Food probably has a very great influence on the condition of men. Wine exercises a more visible influence, food does it more slowly but perhaps just as surely. Who knows if a well-prepared soup was not responsible for the pneumatic pump or a poor one for a war?
The fly that doesn't want to be swatted is most secure when it lights on the fly-swatter.
Courage, garrulousness and the mob are on our side. What more do we want?