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
With most people disbelief in a thing is founded on a blind belief in some other thing.
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
If people should ever start to do only what is necessary millions would die of hunger.
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.
There were honest people long before there were Christians and there are, God be praised, still honest people where there are no Christians. It could therefore easily be possible that people are Christians because true Christianity corresponds to what they would have been even if Christianity did not exist.
There are very many people who read simply to prevent themselves from thinking.
I have often noticed that when people come to understand a mathematical proposition in some other way than that of the ordinary demonstration, they promptly say, "Oh, I see. That's how it must be." This is a sign that they explain it to themselves from within their own system.
We can see nothing whatever of the soul unless it is visible in the expression of the countenance; one might call the faces at a large assembly of people a history of the human soul written in a kind of Chinese ideograms.
People who never have any time on their hands are those who do the least.
There are people who possess not so much genius as a certain talent for perceiving the desires of the century, or even of the decade, before it has done so itself.
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 many people virtue consists chiefly in repenting faults, not in avoiding them.
There is no more important rule of conduct in the world than this: attach yourself as much as you can to people who are abler than you and yet not so very different that you cannot understand them.
Many intelligent people, when about to write . . . , force on their minds a certain notion about style, just as they screw up their faces when they sit for their portraits.