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
The journalists have constructed for themselves a little wooden chapel, which they also call the Temple of Fame, in which they put up and take down portraits all day long and make such a hammering you can't hear yourself speak.
As the few adepts in such things well know, universal morality is to be found in little everyday penny-events just as much as in great ones. There is so much goodness and ingenuity in a raindrop that an apothecary wouldn't let it go for less than half-a-crown...
A good method of discovery is to imagine certain members of a system removed and then see how what is left would behave: for example, where would we be if iron were absent from the world: this is an old example.
The greater part of human misery is caused by indolence.
Deliberate virtue is never worth much: The virtue of feeling or habit is the thing.
What a blessing it would be if we could open and shut our ears...as easily as we open and shut our eyes.
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.
The human tendency to regard little things as important has produced very many great things.
Marriage, in contrast to the flu, starts with a fever and ends with the chills.
Nothing puts a greater obstacle in the way of the progress of knowledge than thinking that one knows what one does not yet know.
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.