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
Body and soul: a horse harnessed beside an ox.
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.
The world is a body common to all men, changes to it bring about a change in the souls of all men who are turned towards that part of it at that moment.
Every condition of the soul has its own sign and expression...So you will see how hard it is to seem original without being so.
Libraries can in general be too narrow or too wide for the soul.
Nothing can contribute more to peace of soul than the lack of any opinion whatever.
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.