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
A donkey appears to me like a horse translated into Dutch.
The fruits of philosophy are the important thing, not the philosophy itself. When we ask the time, we don't want to know how watches are made.
What you have been obliged to discover by yourself leaves a path in your mind which you can use again when the need arises.
The wisdom of providence is as much revealed in the rarity of genius, as in the circumstance that not everyone is deaf or blind.
Everyone is perfectly willing to learn from unpleasant experience - if only the damage of the first lesson could be repaired.
Great men too make mistakes, and many among them do it so often that one is almost tempted to call them little men.
What we have to discover for ourselves leaves behind in our mind a pathway that can be used on another occasion.
Nothing makes one old so quickly as the ever-present thought that one is growing older.
The most heated defenders of a science, who cannot endure the slightest sneer at it, are commonly those who have not made very much progress in it and are secretly aware of this defect.
If another Messiah was born he could hardly do so much good as the printing-press.
Doubt everything at least once, even the sentence "Two times two is four."
People who have read a good deal rarely make great discoveries. I do not say this in excuse of laziness, but because invention presupposes an extensive independent contemplation of things.
With God thoughts are colors, with us they are pigments-even the most abstract one may be accompanied by physical pain.
We are obliged to regard many of our original minds as crazy at least until we have become as clever as they are.