19th-century Astronomer Quotes

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

The sun is but a star; he will meet with the fate of his sisters; suns, like worlds, are born to die, and in eternity their long career will have endured but ' the space of a morning.'

Camille Flammarion

Starlight is falling on every square mile of the earth's surface, and the best we can do at present is to gather up and concentrate the rays that strike at area 100 inches in diameter.

George Ellery Hale

There is no observatory in this land, nor in any land, probably, of which the question is not asked, "Are they doing anything? Why don't we hear from them? They should make discoveries, they should publish."

The cardinal truth emerging from these inquiries is that of the extreme isolation of the solar system. A skiff in the midst of a vast unfurrowed ocean is not more utterly alone.

Agnes Mary Clerke

If my impressions are correct, our educational planing mill cuts down all the knots of genius, and reduces the best of the men who go through it to much the same standard.

Since the [Cepheid] variables are probably at nearly the same distance from the Earth, their periods are apparently associated with their actual emission of light, as determined by their mass, density, and surface brightness.

Henrietta Swan Leavitt

Science deals with the finite though it may carry our thoughts to the infinite.

Richard Anthony Proctor

No theory is sacred. When a theory fails to meet the test of verified predictions, it is modified to include the larger field, or, vary rarely, it may be abandoned completely.

Man's role as an investigator and would-be interpreter of the universe is surpassingly fascinating, whether or not it is cosmically significant.

The work of the true man of Science is a perpetual striving after a better and closer knowledge of the planet on which his lot is cast, and of the universe in the vastness of which that planet is lost.

Dying visions of angels and Christ and God and heaven are confined to credibly good men. Why do not bad men have such visions? They die of all sorts of diseases; they have nervous temperaments; they even have creeds and hopes about the future which they cling to with very great tenacity; why do not they rejoice in some such glorious illusions when they go out of the world?

Enoch Fitch Burr

He thought he saw electrons swift Their charge and mass combine. He looked again and saw it was The cosmic sounding line. The population then, said he, Must be 1079.

"The Story of the Heavens" is... indeed a wondrous story to narrate; and could we tell it adequately, it would prove of boundless interest and of exquisite beauty. It leads to the contemplation of the mightiest efforts of nature and the greatest achievements of human genius.

Robert Stawell Ball

A theory founded on truth, and formed according to the proper rules of science, can ever suffer from a strict examination, by which it would be but the more and more confirmed.

William Huggins

To account for these phenomena, the explanation that at once suggests itself is, that a direct transference of water takes place over the face of the planet, and that the canals are so many waterways.

Percival Lowell

We have gazed awhile upon the gorgeous firmaments of space, and descried not a trace, not a hint, of anything like an end to their number, or a boundary to their unrepeated variety of form.

John Pringle Nichol

The evidence at present available points strongly to the conclusion that the spirals are individual galaxies, or island universes, comparable with our own galaxy in dimension and in number of component units.

Stating his conviction on the nature of nebulae during the Shapley-Curtis debate on 26 Apr 1920 to the National Academy of Sciences.

Heber Doust Curtis

Comets cannot be homes of life; they are not sufficiently condensed; indeed, they are probably but loose congeries of small stones. But even if comets were of planetary size it is clear that life could not be supported on them; water could not remain in the liquid state on a world that rushed from one such extreme of temperature to another.

Edward Walter Maunder

Physical geography invites you to consider the terrestrial machinery which makes day and night, seed-time and harvest; which lifts the vapor from the sea, forms clouds, and waters the earth; which clothes it with verdure and cheers it with warmth, or covers it with snow.

Matthew Fontaine Maury

The way of truth is along the path of intellectual sincerity.

Henry Smith Pritchett

Success in science means the birth of new knowledge.

Sir Richard Gregory, 1st Baronet

Mercury on its axis turns like the Moon:
One side has lasting day, the other night;
One side in everlasting fire doth swoon;
While th'other hides forever from the light.

Giovanni Schiaparelli

By translating the story told by tree rings, we have pushed back the horizons of history in the United States for nearly eight centuries before Columbus reached the shores of the New World...