Astronomer Quotes

Johannes Kepler

Tycho Brahe

William Herschel

Edwin Hubble

Philip Melanchthon

Alfonso X of Castile

Fred Hoyle

Telescope, instrument of much knowledge, more precious than any scepter! Is not he who holds thee in his hand made king and lord of the works of God?

Johannes Kepler

What! the girl I adore by another embraced?
What! the balm of her breath shall another man taste?
What! pressed in the dance by another's man's knee?
What! panting recline on another than me?
Sir, she's yours; you have pressed from the grape its fine blue,
From the rosebud you've shaken the tremulous dew;
What you've touched you may take. Pretty waltzer—adieu!

Henry Englefield

In fabricating new constellations, puerility and meanness aided blind zeal in ransacking the heavens for amorphotae, or unformed stars, wherewith to wheedle accidental rulers of the hour, by exalting them and a heterogeneous assemblage of modern implements, among the heroes and classical symbols of remote ages.

William Henry Smyth

Whenever we look in nature we can see spiral forms in the uncurling fern, the snail, the nautilus shell, the hurricane, the stirred cup of coffee, the water that swirls out of a wash bowl. Perhaps we shouldn't be surprised to see spirals in the great star systems whirling in space. Yet they remain a great, intriguing question.

Cecilia Payne-Gaposchkin

I have searched through the heavens, and nowhere have I found a trace of God.

Jérôme Lalande

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

Self-study, in a sense of learning by yourself without anybody teaching you anything, has an enormous value.

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.

We became astronomers thinking we were studying the universe, and now we learn that we are just studying the 5 or 10 percent that is luminous.

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

To look into space is to look back into time, and telescopes are time machines we can ride nearly all the way back to creation itself.

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

The orbital analysis leads, therefore, to a perturbing mass of only 1.6 times the mass of Jupiter. We shall interpret this result as a companion of Barnard's star, which therefore appears to be a planet.

Peter van de Kamp

A scientist works largely by intuition. Given enough experience, a scientist examining a problem can leap to an intuition as to what the solution 'should look like.'... Science is ultimately based on insight, not logic.

Guy Consolmagno

Ultimately, the origin of the universe is, and always will be, a mystery.

Charles Stuart Bowyer

The hypothesis of plant life... appears still the most satisfactory explanation of the various kinds of dark markings and their complex seasonal and secular changes.

It is a very human tendency to climb a celestial mountain. So it stands for any race, including that of finding individual objects at greater and greater distances.

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

Oh thick wits. Oh blind watchers of the sky.

In Latin: O crassia ingenia, O coecos coeli spectatores.

All nature is one, but for convenience of classification we have divided our knowledge into a number of sciences which we usually regard as quite distinct from each other.

William Harkness

When theory runs too far ahead of what can be measured, a field becomes more philosophy than science.

Christopher McKee

We live in an era when it seems legitimate to try everything conceivable within the known laws of physics, particularly in the absence of data.

Geoffrey Burbidge

Moreover, I desire that with the plan of the wise rulers and with their authority, pious and learned men at some time be called together both from our own churches and the churches of other nations in order that there might be a deliberation about all these controversies, and that one consenting form of doctrine, true and clear and without any ambiguity, might be handed down to posterity.

Philip Melanchthon

His knees should bend and his neck should curl, His back should twist and his face should scowl, One eye should squint and the other protrude, And this should be his customary attitude.

Thus, the very chance and randomness that prevent man from predicting the future are the tools that nature uses to insure not only the emergence of life in each expansion cycle of the universe but also the approach to perfection and complete harmony as more and complex forms of life evolve.