15 Georg Christoph Lichtenberg Quotes on Science

Georg Christoph Lichtenberg quotes on science

3. It is hardly to be believed how spiritual reflections when mixed with a little physics can hold people's attention and give them a livelier idea of God than do the often ill-applied examples of his wrath.

18. Astronomy is perhaps the science whose discoveries owe least to chance, in which human understanding appears in its whole magnitude, and through which man can best learn how small he is.

50. 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.

63. If we make a couple of discoveries here and there we need not believe things will go on like this for ever.... Just as we hit water when we dig in the earth, so we discover the incomprehensible sooner or later.

79. The noble simplicity in the works of nature only too often originates in the noble shortsightedness of him who observes it.

85. Rational free spirits are the light brigade who go on ahead and reconnoitre the ground which the heavy brigade of the orthodox will eventually occupy.

110. There is no greater impediment to progress in the sciences than the desire to see it take place too quickly.

137. My inquiries into physics could perhaps be given the title: legacies. For people do also bequeath trifles, after all.

154. The preaching in the churches does not make the lightning rods on them unnecessary.

172. Georg Christoph Lichtenberg : Experimental Physics from the Spirit of Aphorism (PDF)

176. NASA article on lightning's effects on humans

177. Lichtenberg Figures, Glass and Gemstones

179. About Electricity, Lightning, and Lichtenberg Figures

180. Dielectric Breakdown Model (DBM)

181. Mathematical Description of Diffusion-Limited Aggregation