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
God created man in His own image, says the Bible; philosophers reverse the process: they create God in theirs.
Be wary of passing the judgment: obscure. To find something obscure poses no difficult, elephants and poodles find many things obscure.
There are very many people who read simply to prevent themselves from thinking.
It is we who are the measure of what is strange and miraculous: if we sought a universal measure the strange and miraculous would not occur and all things would be equal.
We cannot remember too often that when we observe nature, and especially the ordering of nature, it is always ourselves alone we are observing.
What is called an acute knowledge of human nature is mostly nothing but the observer's own weaknesses reflected back from others.
With a pen in my hand I have successfully stormed bulwarks from which others armed with sword and excommunication have been repulsed.
Truly, men make too little use of their lives; and so it is no wonder that the world should still be in such a poor way.
I believe that man is in the last resort so free a being that his right to be what he believes himself to be cannot be contested.
He who knows himself properly can very soon learn to know all other men. It is all reflection.
It is in the gift for employing all the vicissitudes of life to one's own advantage and to that of one's craft that a large part of genius consists.
Never undertake anything for which you wouldn't have the courage to ask the blessings of heaven.
What makes our poetry so contemptible nowadays is its paucity of ideas. If you want to be read, invent. Who the Devil wouldn't like to read something new?
He who says he hates every kind of flattery, and says it in earnest, certainly does not yet know every kind of flattery.