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
Once we know our weaknesses they cease to do us any harm.
What we are able to judge with feeling is very little; the rest is all prejudice and complaisance.
The girl who reveals herself heart and soul to her friend reveals the secrets of the entire sex; for every girl is the guardian of the feminine mysteries.
He who understands the wise is wise already.
The excuses we make to ourselves when we want to do something are excellent material for soliloquies, for they are rarely made except when we are alone, and are very often made aloud.
If this is philosophy it is at any rate a philosophy that is not in its right mind.
I forget the greater part of what I read, but all the same it nourishes my mind.
I am always grieved when a man of real talent dies. The world needs such men more than Heaven does.
It is with epigrams as with other inventions; the best ones annoy us because we didn't think of them ourselves.
I look upon book reviews as an infantile disease which new-born books are subject to.
One can live in this world on soothsaying but not on truth saying.
The drive to propagate our race has also propagated a lot of other things
The lower classes of men, though they do not think it worthwhile to record what they perceive, nevertheless perceive everything that is worth noting; the difference between them and a man of learning often consists in nothing more than the latter's facility for expression.
The grave is still the best shelter against the storms of destiny.