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
Before we blame we should first see whether we cannot excuse.
A book is a mirror: if an ape looks into it an apostle is hardly likely to look out.
It is strange that only extraordinary men make the discoveries, which later appear so easy and simple.
Just as we outgrow a pair of trousers, we outgrow acquaintances, libraries, principles, etc., at times before they're worn out and times - and this is the worst of all - before we have new ones.
The proof that man is the noblest of all creatures is that no other creature has ever denied it.
Those who never have time do least
The great trick of regarding small departures from the truth as the truth itself - on which is founded the entire integral calculus - is also the basis of our witty speculations, where the whole thing would often collapse if we considered the departures with philosophical rigour.
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.
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.