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
Georg C. Lichtenberg quotes about
Knowledge acquired too rapidly and without being personally supplemented is never very productive.
Body and soul: a horse harnessed beside an ox.
Everyone who has ever written will have discovered that writing always awakens something which, though it lay within us, we failed clearly to recognize before.
One use of dreams is that, unprejudiced by our often forced and artificial reflections, they represent the impartial outcome of our entire being.
Never trust a man who lays his hand on his heart when he assures you of anything.
To live when you do not want to is dreadful, but it would be even more terrible to be immortal when you did not want to be. As things are, however, the whole ghastly burden is suspended from me by a thread which I can cut in two with a penny-knife.
Honor is infinitely more valuable than positions of honor.
It is a dangerous thing for the perfecting of our minds to gain applause by works that do not call forth the whole of our energies; for in that case one generally comes to a standstill.
The greatest things in the world are brought about by other things which we count as nothing: little causes we overlook but which at length accumulate.
How few friends would remain friends if each could see the sentiments of the other in their entirety.
What makes our poetry so contemptible nowadays is its paucity of ideas. If you want to be read, invent. Who the Devil wouldn't like to read something new?
Popular presentation today is all too often that which puts the mob in a position to talk about something without understanding it.
Cultivate that kind of knowledge which enables us to discover for ourselves in case of need that which others have to read or be told of.
If countries were named after the words you first hear when you go there, England would have to be called Damn It.