Science Quote by Georg C. Lichtenberg

Calling something "obscure" is the laziest kind of intellectual self-defense: it shifts the burden from the reader to the text, from effort to disdain. Lichtenberg, a scientist with a satirist's knife, aims straight at that reflex. His jab works because it refuses to treat confusion as a verdict. "Obscure" can be an honest report of difficulty, but more often it's a social move: a way to signal taste, impatience, or superiority while avoiding the vulnerable admission, "I don't get it yet."

The animal comparison is doing heavy lifting. Elephants and poodles both "find many things obscure" because obscurity, in this framing, isn't a property of an object; it's a mismatch between a mind and a matter. The gag lands on two levels. It equalizes the grand and the trivial (the elephant and the poodle), puncturing the idea that feeling baffled is proof of special discernment. It also downgrades the complaint itself: if even a poodle can declare something obscure, what kind of achievement is that?

Context matters. Lichtenberg wrote in the Enlightenment's shadow, when scientific prose, philosophy, and public debate were rapidly professionalizing. Jargon and mystique were becoming tools of authority, and skepticism was a civic virtue. His warning reads like a field guide for that moment: resist both the charlatan who hides behind darkness and the critic who mistakes their own impatience for rigor.

Under the wit is an ethic: intellectual humility paired with intellectual responsibility. Don't confuse your limits with the world's. Don't confuse difficulty with fraud. And don't flatter yourself for finding fog; the hard work is in clearing it.