Georg C. Lichtenberg Quotes
The most perfect ape cannot draw an ape; only man can do that; but, likewise, only man regards the ability to do this as a sign of superiority.
Lichtenberg, Georg Christoph. The Waste Books. Translated by R. J. Hollingdale, New York Review Books, 2000.
Randell, a Nobel Laureate brain scientist, is also an art collector, and has studied the brain’s reaction to different kinds of art. There are some people who become so distressed with the burden of using their imagination and expecting not to have to do so, do not have a more intense experience or much of an experience at all as the reject the notion of using their imagination. They see that as the artist’s job and we say of those people that they do not care for abstract art.
Georg Christoph Lichtenberg was a German physicist, satirist, and Anglophile. As a scientist, he was the first to hold a professorship explicitly dedicated to experimental physics in Germany. 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 tree-like electrical discharge patterns now called Lichtenberg figures.
