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
The "second sight" possessed by the Highlanders in Scotland is actually a foreknowledge of future events. I believe they possess this gift because they don't wear trousers.
We have to believe that everything has a cause, as the spider spins its web in order to catch flies. But it does this before it knows there are such things as flies.
They do not think, therefore they are not.
That man is the noblest creature may also be inferred from the fact that no other creature has yet contested this claim.
It is hardly to be believed how spiritual reflections when mixed with a little physics can hold people's attention and give them a livelier idea of God than do the often ill-applied examples of his wrath.
Everyone should study at least enough philosophy and belles-lettres to make his sexual experience more delectable.
The wisdom of providence is as much revealed in the rarity of genius, as in the circumstance that not everyone is deaf or blind.
Perseverance can lend the appearance of dignity and grandeur to many actions, just as silence in company affords wisdom and apparent intelligence to a stupid person.
I have never yet met anyone who did not think it was an agreeable sensation to cut tinfoil with scissors.
In the world we live in, one fool makes many fools, but one sage only a few sages.
If all else fails, the character of a man can be recognized by nothing so surely as by a jest which he takes badly.
A person reveals his character by nothing so clearly as the joke he resents.
The pleasures of the imagination are as it were only drawings and models which are played with by poor people who cannot afford the real thing.
If you are going to build something in the air it is always better to build castles than houses of cards.