Georg Christoph Lichtenberg vs. Samuel Johnson
Side-by-side comparison of two thinkers
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."
Samuel Johnson
1709 – 1784
Samuel Johnson, often called Dr Johnson, was an English writer who made lasting contributions as a poet, playwright, essayist, moralist, literary critic, sermonist, biographer, editor, and lexicographer. The Oxford Dictionary of National Biography calls him "arguably the most distinguished man of letters in English history".
"Declamation roared, while Passion slept."
Connections
Both wrote about: