George MacDonald vs. Georg Christoph Lichtenberg
Side-by-side comparison of two thinkers
George MacDonald
1824 – 1905
George MacDonald was a Scottish author, poet and Congregational minister. He became a pioneering figure in the field of modern fantasy literature and the mentor of fellow-writer Lewis Carroll. In addition to his fairy tales, MacDonald wrote several works of Christian theology, including several collections of sermons.
"We are often unable to tell people what they need to know because they want to know something else."
Georg Christoph Lichtenberg
1786 – 1845
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.
"Many things about our bodies would not seem to us so filthy and obscene if we did not have the idea of nobility in our heads."