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
Bad writers are those who try to express their own feeble ideas in the language of good ones.
There is something in our minds like sunshine and the weather, which is not under our control. When I write, the best things come to me from I know not where.
The book which most deserved to be banned would be a catalog of banned books.
Brevity: To say at once whatever is to be said.
I made the journey to knowledge like dogs who go for walks with their masters, a hundred times forward and backward over the same territory; and when I arrived I was tired.
If nature be regarded as the teacher and we poor human beings as her pupils, the human race presents a very curious picture. We all sit together at a lecture and possess the necessary principles for understanding it, yet we always pay more attention to the chatter of our fellow students than to the lecturer's discourse. Or, if our neighbor copies something down, we sneak it from him, stealing what he himself may have heard imperfectly, and add it to our own errors of spelling and opinion.
Never undertake anything unless you have the heart to ask Heaven's blessing on your undertaking.
One should never trust a person who, while assuring you of something, puts his hands on his heart.
He who says he hates all kinds of flattery, and says so in earnest, has undoubtedly not as yet become acquainted with all kinds of it, whether in substance or in form.
A man always writes absolutely well whenever he writes in his own manner, but the wigmaker who tries to write like Gellert ... writes badly.
There is something in the character of every man which cannot be broken in--the skeleton of his character; and to try to alter this is like training a sheep for draught purposes.
Before one blames, one should always find out whether one cannot excuse.
If brandy was made out of sparrows there would soon be no sparrows.
No despotism is so formidable as that of a religion or a scientific system.