19th-century Astronomer Quotes

Edwin Hubble

Camille Flammarion

Giovanni Schiaparelli

Percival Lowell

Simon Newcomb

Henrietta Swan Leavitt

Norman Lockyer

Someone has said that a pessimist is a man who looks at the world with one eye closed, and that an optimist is a man who looks at the world with both eyes closed.

Harlan True Stetson

Ingenious and powerful instruments have been devised, which reveal wonders otherwise unimagined, and the end is not yet. Each new telescopic giant is expected to win fresh laurels in old fields of endeavor, or to make discoveries which shall link its name forever with the stars.

Herbert Alonzo Howe

When Euclid framed his definitions He did not miss "the point"; Space was prescribed by his conditions For angles twain conjoint.

Herbert Hall Turner

Science does not, I think, give a positive answer to questions concerning the immortality of the human soul...

The modern, and to my mind the true, theory is that mathematics is the abstract form of the natural sciences; and that it is valuable as a training of the reasoning powers, not because it is abstract, but because it is a representative of actual things.

Truman Henry Safford

Counting correctly is very difficult, because, so to put it, it requires from the mind a simultaneous hold upon the past, present, and future. Counting, on the other hand, done carefully is the only region of knowledge, even of mathematics, in which we can be perfectly sure we are not talking nonsense.

Ralph Allan Sampson

We need a new kind of engineer, one who can build bridges to society as well as bridges across rivers.

William Henry Pickering

A life spent in the routine of science need not destroy the attractive human element of a woman's nature.

Annie Jump Cannon

Undoubtedly one of the greatest difficulties, if not the greatest of all, in the way of obtaining an understanding of the real distribution of stars in space, lies in our uncertainty about the amount of loss suffered by the light of the stars on its way to the observer.

Jacobus Kapteyn

To save my soul I can't believe in the canals as Schiaparelli draws them.... I verily believe... that the canals as depicted by Schiaparelli are a fallacy and that they will be so proved before many oppositions are past.

Edward Emerson Barnard

Observations buried in a desk are no observations.

Friedrich Wilhelm Argelander

When we gaze at the starlit heavens, and admire the silvery radiance of the Milky Way, we would fain believe that there is absolute silence and rest, a perfect haven of repose.

Physics is not a series of disconnected subjects, including Mechanics, Sound, Light, Heat, and Electricity. It is, on the contrary, a body of well-organized truth, forming one great whole; illustrating, as do few other subjects, what Dickens called "the universal dove-tailedness of things."

The electrons are like little organisms, or least hearts, whose synchronous systole and diastole make the life of the universe, perpetually receiving and transmitting energy from an inexhaustible source.

Frank Washington Very

The unsolved problems of Nature have a distinctive fascination, though they still far outnumber those which have even approximately been resolved.

Henry Norris Russell

Counting stars is not unlike counting people or sheep or pebbles on the seashore. The astronomer's difficulties are not in the counting, but rather in knowing when the counting must start and stop.

Frederick Hanley Seares

The wisest astronomer living cannot tell us how far the stars reach...for there is no getting to the borders of space.

It seems to me that the tendency of our mathematical instruction and... examinations has been of late years to promote the acquisition of a knowledge of formal relations of symbols and the power of readily producing them,

The stars are the crucibles of the Creator.

David Gill (astronomer)

A generation ago, men thought the "perfect science," for so we love to, call astronomy, could advance only by increasing a little the exact precision of observation.

Happy is genius, when it lights on a profession entirely consonant to its powers, where the objects successively presented to it are so exactly suited to its nature, that it clings to them as the loadstone to its kindred metal among piles of foreign ores.

Denison Olmsted

The astronomer has borrowed almost all his tools from the physicist; the prism, the grating, the photoelectric cell, the interferometer, the photographic plate, even the telescope itself, were all used in the laboratory before they were applied to the sky.

Frank Schlesinger

The discovery of unknown laws and principles, as well as the explanation of phenomena by laws already known, is one of its [astrophysics] most important objects.

James Edward Keeler

The imagination of mankind has never resisted the fascination of the moon.

Garrett P. Serviss

Astronomers do not overlook a wide and open valley, but rather from the foothills of a mountain range, look upward into mists and clouds, and every path soon disappears into obscurity, except where here and there sunlight breaks through.

Charles Augustus Young