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
It is in the gift for employing all the vicissitudes of life to one's own advantage and to that of one's craft that a large part of genius consists.
With a pen in my hand I have successfully stormed bulwarks from which others armed with sword and excommunication have been repulsed.
What is called an acute knowledge of human nature is mostly nothing but the observer's own weaknesses reflected back from others.
We cannot remember too often that when we observe nature, and especially the ordering of nature, it is always ourselves alone we are observing.
There are very many people who read simply to prevent themselves from thinking.
If you are going to build something in the air it is always better to build castles than houses of cards.
A handful of soldiers is always better than a mouthful of arguments.
Do not say hypothesis, and even less theory: say way of thinking.
Do we write books so that they shall merely be read? Don't we also write them for employment in the household? For one that is read from start to finish, thousands are leafed through, other thousands lie motionless, others are jammed against mouseholes, thrown at rats, others are stood on, sat on, drummed on, have gingerbread baked on them or are used to light pipes.
A vacuum of ideas affects people differently than a vacuum of air, otherwise readers of books would be constantly collapsing.
A donkey appears to me like a horse translated into Dutch.
In the world we live in, one fool makes many fools, but one sage only a few sages.
Libraries can in general be too narrow or too wide for the soul.
A book which, above all others in the world, should be forbidden, is a catalogue of forbidden books.