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
Deliberate virtue is never worth much: The virtue of feeling or habit is the thing.
If we thought more for ourselves we would have very many more bad books and very many more good ones.
In each of us there is a little of all of us.
A schoolteacher or professor cannot educate individuals, he educates only species.
Marriage, in contrast to the flu, starts with a fever and ends with the chills.
He was always smoothing and polishing himself, and in the end he became blunt before he was sharp.
So-called professional mathematicians have, in their reliance on the relative incapacity of the rest of mankind, acquired for themselves a reputation for profundity very similar to the reputation for sanctity possessed by theologians.
To grow wiser means to learn to know better and better the faults to which this instrument with which we feel and judge can be subject.
I ceased in the year 1764 to believe that one can convince one’s opponents with arguments printed in books. It is not to do that, therefore, that I have taken up my pen, but merely so as to annoy them, and to bestow strength and courage on those on our own side, and to make it known to the others that they have not convinced us.
One might call habit a moral friction: something that prevents the mind from gliding over things but connects it with them and makes it hard for it to free itself from them.
It is almost impossible to carry the torch of truth through a crowd without singeing somebody's beard.
Courage, garrulousness and the mob are on our side. What more do we want?
They do not think, therefore they are not.
Many things about our bodies would not seem to us so filthy and obscene if we did not have the idea of nobility in our heads.