Quotes by Georg Christoph Lichtenberg

Georg Christoph Lichtenberg was a professor of physics at Göttingen — the first in Germany — who kept private notebooks he called waste books, filling them for thirty years with observations, jokes and hypotheses. They were published after his death and turned out to be one of the great collections of aphorisms in any language. Nietzsche, Tolstoy and Wittgenstein all read him. He was also a serious experimenter, and the branching discharge figures in dielectrics are named after him.