Quotes by Astronomers - Page 2

If I have ever made any valuable discoveries it has been owing more to patient attention than to any other talent.
Isaac Newton
With luck on your side you can do without brains.
Giordano Bruno
There is one basic cause of all effects.
Giordano Bruno
No-wher so bisy a man as he ter nas And yet he semed bisier that he was.
Geoffrey Chaucer
Myself when young did eagerly frequent Doctor and Saint and heard great argument About it and about: but evermore Came out by the same door where in I went.
Omar Khayyám
But Lord Crist! whan that it remembreth me Upon my yowthe and on my jolitee It tickleth me aboute myn herte roote. Unto this day it dooth myn herte boote That I have had my world as in my tyme. But age alias! that al wole envenyme Hath me biraft my beautee and my pith. Lat go farewel! the devel go therwith! The flour is goon ther is namoore to telle The bren as I best kan now most I selle.
Geoffrey Chaucer
Make a virtue of necessity.
Geoffrey Chaucer
Give me where to stand and I will move the earth.
Archimedes
...it's appalling to remember that the entire Oxford University Library was sold for scrap in the mid-1500s. Nor was that situation unique to Oxford, as libraries were deconstructed throughout the land.
Owen Gingerich
Whether at Naishápúr or Babylon, Whether the Cup with sweet or bitter run, The Wine of Life keeps oozing drop by drop, The Leaves of Life keep falling one by one.
Omar Khayyám
The Wine of Life keeps oozing drop by drop, The Leaves of Life keep falling one by one.
Omar Khayyám
Were it not Folly, Spider-like to spinThe Thread of present Life away to win-What? for ourselves, who know not if we shallBreathe out the very Breath we now breathe in!
Omar Khayyám
One of the great commandments of science is, "Mistrust arguments from authority." (Scientists, being primates, and thus given to dominance hierarchies, of course do not always follow this commandment.) Too many such arguments have proved too painfully wrong. Authorities must prove their contentions like everybody else. This independence of science, its occasional unwillingness to accept conventional wisdom, makes it dangerous to doctrines less self critical, or with pretensions of certitude.
Carl Sagan
Cosmology is a science which has only a few observable facts to work with.
Robert Woodrow Wilson
The rules of scientific investigation always require us, when we enter the domains of conjecture, to adopt that hypothesis by which the greatest number of known facts and phenomena may be reconciled.
Matthew Fontaine Maury
But if the Bible is not everywhere literally true, which parts are divinely inspired and which are merely fallible and human? As soon as we admit that there are scriptural mistakes (or concessions to the ignorance of the times), then how can the Bible be an inerrant guide to ethics and morals? Might sects and individuals now accept as authentic the parts of the Bible they like, and reject those that are inconvenient or burdensome?
Carl Sagan
In its encounter with Nature, science invariably elicits a sense of reverence and awe. The very act of understanding is a celebration of joining, merging, even if on a very modest scale, with the magnificence of the Cosmos. And the cumulative worldwide build-up of knowledge over time converts science into something only a little short of a trans-national, trans-generational meta-mind.
Carl Sagan
The same few dozen organic molecules are used over and over again in biology for the widest variety of functions.
Carl Sagan
Geometria est archetypus pulchritudinis mundi-Mathematics is the archetype of the beauty of the world-Kepler
Kepler
The ingenious method of expressing every possible number using a set of ten symbols (each symbol having a place value and an absolute value) emerged in India. The idea seems so simple nowadays that its significance and profound importance is no longer appreciated ... The importance of this invention is more readily appreciated when one considers that it was beyod the two greatest men of antiquity, Archimedes and Apollonius.
Pierre-Simon Laplace
Mathematics, as much as music or any other art, is one of the means by which we rise to a complete self-consciousness. The significance of mathematics resides precisely in the fact that it is an art; by informing us of the nature of our own minds it informs us of much that depends on our minds.
Antoine Thomson d'Abbadie
Mathematics is the science which draws necessary conclusions.
Benjamin Peirce
And, believe me, if I were again beginning my studies, I should follow the advice of Plato and start with mathematics.
Galileo Galilei
Mathemata mathematicis scribuntur.
Nicolaus Copernicus
Nothing takes place in the world whose meaning is not that of some maximum or minimum.
Leonhard Euler
... the irregularities of the motion of Uranus...in order to find out whether they may be attributed to the action of an undiscovered planet beyond it.[John Couch Adams on how he began to discover Neptune.]
John Couch Adams
No great discovery was ever made without a bold guess.
Isaac Newton
For I see not what there is desirable in publick esteeme, were I able to acquire & maintaine it. It would perhaps increase my acquaintance, the thing which I chiefly study to decline.
Isaac Newton
Advances in medicine and agriculture have saved vastly more lives than have been lost in all the wars in history.
Carl Sagan
We sometimes hear of things that can travel faster than light. Something called 'the speed of thought' is occasionally proffered. This is an exceptionally silly notion especially since the speed of impulses through the neutrons in our brain is about the same as the speed of a donkey cart.
Carl Sagan
Advertising teaches people not to trust their judgment. Advertising teaches people to be stupid.
Carl Sagan
But if they called everything divine which they do not understand, why, there would be no end of divine beings.
Carl Sagan
And after winter folweth grene May.
Geoffrey Chaucer
Black holes collect problems faster than they collect matter.
Carl Sagan
[The fine structure constant] ... defines how firmly atomic nuclei bind together and how all the atoms on Earth were made. Its value controls the power from the Sun and, more sensitively, how stars transmute hydrogen into all the atoms of the periodic table.
Martin J. Rees
Give me a place to stand, a lever long enough and a fulcrum. and I can move the Earth
Archimedes
doctors & druggists wash each other's hands
Geoffrey Chaucer
If a little kid ever asks you just why the sky is blue, you look him or her right in the eye and say, "It's because of quantum effects involving Rayleigh scattering combined with a lack of violet photon receptors in our retinae.
Philip Plait
Many religions have attempted to make statues of their gods very large, and the idea, I suppose, is to make us feel small. But if that's their purpose, they can keep their paltry icons. We need only look up if we wish to feel small.
Carl Sagan
To get he had tried,yet his store was still meager.To a wise man he cried,in a voice keen and eager;Pray tell me how I may successfully live?And the wise man replied,"To get you must give."As to giving he said,"What have I to give?"I've scarce enough bread,and of course one must live;But I would partake of Life's bountifulstore. Came the wise man's response;"Then you must give more."The lesson he learned;to get was forgotten,Toward mankind he turnedwith a love new begotten.As he gave of himself in useful living,Then joy crowned his days,for he grew rich in giving.
Arthur William Beer
I know that my singing doesn’t make the moon rise, nor does it make the stars shine. But without my song, the night would seem empty and incomplete. There is more to daybreak than light, just as there is more to nighttime than darkness.
Geoffrey Chaucer
In the year 1456 ... a Comet was seen passing Retrograde between the Earth and the sun... Hence I dare venture to foretell, that it will return again in the year 1758.
Edmond Halley
The orbit of every planet is an ellipse with the sun at one of the two foci.
Johannes Kepler
In the midst of all dwells the Sun. For who could set this luminary in another or better place in this most glorious temple, than whence he can at one and the same time brighten the whole.
Nicolaus Copernicus
Now because 18 months ago the first dawn, 3 months ago broad daylight but a very few days ago the full sun of the most highly remarkable spectacle has risen — nothing holds me back. I can give myself up to the sacred frenzy, I can have the insolence to make a full confession to mortal men that I have stolen the golden vessel of the Egyptians to make from them a tabernacle for my God far from the confines of the land of Egypt. If you forgive me I shall rejoice; if you are angry, I shall bear it; I am indeed casting the die and writing the book, either for my contemporaries or for posterity to read, it matters not which: let the book await its reader for a hundred years; God himself has waited six thousand years for his work to be seen.
Johannes Kepler
But germs are the most common snowflake starters and lie at the heart of 85 percent of all flakes.2So next time you gaze at a lovely snowstorm, inform your favorite germophobe or hypochondriac that living bacteria sit shivering in most of those untold billions of flakes. Then hand him or her a snow cone or organize a catch-a-snowflake-on-your-tongue party.Once the ice-forming process is started, more molecules join the party, and the crystal grows. It can ultimately become either a snowflake or a rough granule of ice called by the odd name graupel. A snowflake contains ten quintillion water molecules. That’s ten million trillion. Ten snowflakes—which can fit on your thumb tip—have the same number of molecules as there are grains of sand on the earth. Or stars in the visible universe. How many flakes, how many molecules fashioned the snowy landscape I was observing as I drove east? It numbed the brain.
Bob Berman
Intuitive: The word conveys, I think, a diffuse annoyance at our inability to understand how we come by such knowledge.
Carl Sagan
Major scientific insights are characteristically intuitive, and equally characteristically described in scientific papers by linear analytical arguments. There is no anomaly in this: it is, rather, just as it should be. The creative act has major right-hemisphere components. But arguments on thevalidity of the result are largely left-hemisphere functions.
Carl Sagan
People are not stupid. They believe things for reasons. The last way for skeptics to get the attention of bright, curious, intelligent people is to belittle or condescend or to show arrogance toward their beliefs.
Carl Sagan
The secret of architectural excellence is to translate the proportions of a dachshund into bricks, mortar and marble.
Christopher Wren
Plato is my friend, Aristotle is my friend, but my greatest friend is truth.
Isaac Newton
It is certainly true that all beliefs and all myths are worthy of a respectful hearing. It is not true that all folk beliefs are equally valid - if we’re talking not about an internal mindset, but about understanding of the external reality.
Carl Sagan
There is a coherent plan to the universe, though I don't know what it's a plan for.
Fred Hoyle
We, all of us, are what happens when a primordial mixture of hydrogen and helium evolves for so long that it begins to ask where it came from.
Jill Tarter
The total amount of energy from outside the solar system ever received by all the radio telescopes on the planet Earth is less than the energy of a single snowflake striking the ground.
Carl Sagan
Our television signals leave this planet and go out into space...the signals spread out from the earth in spherical waves, a little like ripples in a pond. They travel at the speed of light, 186,000 miles a second, and essentially go on forever. The better some other civilizations receivers are, the farther away they could be and still pick up our tv signals. Even we could detect a strong tv transmission from a planet going around the nearest star.' President: 'You mean everything? You mean to say all that crap on television - the car crashes, wrestling, the porno channels, the evening news?
Carl Sagan
Even if the aliens are short, dour, and sexually obsessed—if they’re here, I want to know about them.
Carl Sagan
What caused me to undertake the catalog was the nebula I discovered above the southern horn of Taurus on September 12, 1758, while observing the comet of that year. ... This nebula had such a resemblance to a comet in its form and brightness that I endeavored to find others, so that astronomers would not confuse these same nebulae with comets just beginning to shine. I observed further with suitable refractors for the discovery of comets, and this is the purpose I had in mind in compiling the catalog.After me, the celebrated Herschel published a catalog of 2000 which he has observed. This unveiling the sky, made with instruments of great aperture, does not help in the perusal of the sky for faint comets. Thus my object is different from his, and I need only nebulae visible in a telescope of two feet [focal length].
Charles Messier
Billions of years from now our sun, then a distended red giant star, will have reduced Earth to a charred cinder. But the Voyager record will still be largely intact, in some other remote region of the Milky Way galaxy, preserving a murmur of an ancient civilization that once flourished — perhaps before moving on to greater deeds and other worlds — on the distant planet Earth.
Carl Sagan
Birds know, better than humans, not to spoil the nest.
Carl Sagan