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
All mathematical laws which we find in Nature are always suspect to me, in spite of their beauty. They give me no pleasure. They are merely auxiliaries. At close range it is all not true.
Those who have racked their brains to discover new proofs have perhaps been induced to do so by a compulsion they could not quite explain to themselves. Instead of giving us their new proofs they should have explained to us the motivation that constrained them to search for them.
I would give something to know for whose sake precisely those deeds were really done which report says were done for the fatherland.
Why does a suppurating lung give so little warning and a sore on the finger so much?
First there is a time when we believe everything, then for a little while we believe with discrimination, then we believe nothing whatever, and then we believe everything again - and, moreover, give reasons why we believe.
The proof that man is the noblest of all creatures is that no other creature has ever denied it.
Before we blame we should first see whether we cannot excuse.
With most people disbelief in a thing is founded on a blind belief in some other thing.
If the little bit you have is nothing special in itself, at least find a way of saying it that is a little bit special.
Some men come by the name of genius in the same way as an insect comes by the name of centipede - not because it has a hundred feet, but because most people can't count above fourteen
It thunders, howls, roars, hisses, whistles, blusters, hums, growls, rumbles, squeaks, groans, sings, crackles, cracks, rattles, flickers, clicks, snarls, tumbles, whimpers, whines, rustles, murmurs, crashes, clucks, to gurgle, tinkles, blows, snores, claps, to lisp, to cough, it boils, to scream, to weep, to sob, to croak, to stutter, to lisp, to coo, to breathe, to clash, to bleat, to neigh, to grumble, to scrape, to bubble. These words, and others like them, which express sounds are more than mere symbols: they are a kind of hieroglyphics for the ear.
Love is blind, but marriage restores its sight.
To do just the opposite is also a form of imitation.
It is strange that only extraordinary men make the discoveries, which later appear so easy and simple.