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
Knowledge acquired too rapidly and without being personally supplemented is never very productive.
Is it so unjust that a man should leave the world by the same gate through which he entered it?
Body and soul: a horse harnessed beside an ox.
It is a dangerous thing for the perfecting of our minds to gain applause by works that do not call forth the whole of our energies; for in that case one generally comes to a standstill.
Honor is infinitely more valuable than positions of honor.
To live when you do not want to is dreadful, but it would be even more terrible to be immortal when you did not want to be. As things are, however, the whole ghastly burden is suspended from me by a thread which I can cut in two with a penny-knife.
Do not take too artificial a view of mankind but judge them from a natural standpoint, deeming them neither over good nor over bad.
The rules of grammar are mere human statutes, which is why when he speaks out of the possessed the Devil himself speaks bad Latin.
One of our forefathers must have read a forbidden book.
Diogenes, filthily attired, paced across the splendid carpets in Plato's dwelling. Thus, said he, do I trample on the pride of Plato. Yes, Plato replied, but only with another kind of pride.
Ask yourself always: how can this be done better?
Perhaps pure reason without heart would never have thought of God.
Everyone is perfectly willing to learn from unpleasant experience - if only the damage of the first lesson could be repaired.
Great men too make mistakes, and many among them do it so often that one is almost tempted to call them little men.