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Georg C. Lichtenberg

physicist, astronomer, writer, mathematician, university teacher, French moralist, philosopher

1742 – 1799

Georg Christoph Lichtenberg was a German physicist, satirist, and Anglophile. He was the first person in Germany to hold a professorship explicitly dedicated to experimental physics. He is remembered for his posthumously published notebooks, which he himself called Sudelbücher, a description modelled on the English bookkeeping term "waste books" or "scrapbooks", and for his discovery of the tree-like electrical discharge patterns now called Lichtenberg figures.

All Quotes by Georg C. Lichtenberg

The Greeks possessed a knowledge of human nature we seem hardly able to attain to without passing through the strengthening hibernation of a new barbarism.

Georg C. Lichtenberg

The pleasures of the imagination are as it were only drawings and models which are played with by poor people who cannot afford the real thing.

Georg C. Lichtenberg

Perhaps in time the so-called Dark Ages will be thought of as including our own.

Georg C. Lichtenberg

The pleasures of the imagination are as it were only drawings and models which are played with by poor people who cannot afford the real thing.

Georg C. Lichtenberg

We cannot remember too often that when we observe nature, and especially the ordering of nature, it is always ourselves alone we are observing.

Georg C. Lichtenberg

Everyone is a genius at least once a year. The real geniuses simply have their bright ideas closer together.

Georg C. Lichtenberg

We accumulate our opinions at an age when our understanding is at its weakest.

Georg C. Lichtenberg

What is called an acute knowledge of human nature is mostly nothing but the observer's own weaknesses reflected back from others.

Georg C. Lichtenberg

Much can be inferred about a man from his mistress: in her one beholds his weaknesses and his dreams.

Georg C. Lichtenberg

One must judge men not by their opinions, but by what their opinions have made of them.

Georg C. Lichtenberg

What is the good of drawing conclusions from experience? I don't deny we sometimes draw the right conclusions, but don't we just as often draw the wrong ones?

Georg C. Lichtenberg

We cannot remember too often that when we observe nature, and especially the ordering of nature, it is always ourselves alone we are observing.

Georg C. Lichtenberg

I cannot say whether things will get better if we change; what I can say is they must change if they are to get better.

Georg C. Lichtenberg

Even truth needs to be clad in new garments if it is to appeal to a new age.

Georg C. Lichtenberg