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
There exists a species of transcendental ventriloquism by means of which men can be made to believe that something said on earth comes from Heaven.
It is in most cases more difficult to make intelligent people believe that you are what you are not, than really to become what you would appear to be.
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.
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.
Affectation is a very good word when someone does not wish to confess to what he would none the less like to believe of himself.
I ceased in the year 1764 to believe that one can convince one’s opponents with arguments printed in books. It is not to do that, therefore, that I have taken up my pen, but merely so as to annoy them, and to bestow strength and courage on those on our own side, and to make it known to the others that they have not convinced us.
Man is a masterpiece of creation, if only because no amount of determinism can prevent him from believing that he acts as a free being.
If an angel were to tell us about his philosophy, I believe many of his statements might well sound like '2 x 2= 13'.
If we make a couple of discoveries here and there we need not believe things will go on like this for ever. Just as we hit water when we dig in the earth, so we discover the incomprehensible sooner or later.
Man is a masterpiece of creation if for no other reason than that, all the weight of evidence for determinism notwithstanding, he believes he has free will.
To make astute people believe one is what one is not is, in most cases, harder than actually to become what one wishes to appear.
To see every day how people get the name 'genius' just as the wood-lice in the cellar the name 'millipede'-not because they have that many feet, but because most people don't want to count to 14-this has had the result that I don't believe anyone any more without checking.
You believe I run after the strange because I do not know the beautiful; no, it is because you do not know the beautiful that I seek the strange.