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 proof that man is the noblest of all creatures is that no other creature has ever denied it.
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 is strange that only extraordinary men make the discoveries, which later appear so easy and simple.
Men still have to be governed by deception.
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.
I am always grieved when a man of real talent dies. The world needs such men more than Heaven does.
The lower classes of men, though they do not think it worthwhile to record what they perceive, nevertheless perceive everything that is worth noting; the difference between them and a man of learning often consists in nothing more than the latter's facility for expression.
Propositions on which all men are in agreement are true: if they are not true we have no truth at all.
There is something in the character of every man which cannot be broken in--the skeleton of his character; and to try to alter this is like training a sheep for draught purposes.
A man always writes absolutely well whenever he writes in his own manner, but the wigmaker who tries to write like Gellert ... writes badly.
Is it so unjust that a man should leave the world by the same gate through which he entered it?
Great men too make mistakes, and many among them do it so often that one is almost tempted to call them little men.
With prophecies the commentator is often a more important man than the prophet.
Nothing reveals a man's character better than the kind of joke at which he takes offense.