Bernard Le Bovier de Fontenelle Quotes

45 Sourced Quotes

Truth enters so naturally into the mind, that when we learn any thing for the first time, it appears as if we only remembered the thing learned, or exerted the faculty of our memory.

Bernard Le Bovier de Fontenelle
When the heavens were a little blue arch, stuck with stars, me thought the universe was too straight and close: I was almost stifled for want of air: but now it is enlarged in height and breadth, and a thousand vortices taken in. I begin to breathe with more freedom, and I think the universe to be incomparably more magnificent than it was before.

Bernard Le Bovier de Fontenelle
I see the universe so large... that I know not where I am, or what will become of me.

Bernard Le Bovier de Fontenelle
It was the business of the Sorbonne to discuss; of the Pope to decide; and of the mathematician to go to heaven in a perpendicular line.

Bernard Le Bovier de Fontenelle
We think ourselves unhappy when a comet appears; but it is the comet itself which is unfortunate.

Bernard Le Bovier de Fontenelle
These foreign planets, with their tails and their beards, have a terrible menacing countenance, it may be they are sent to affront us...

Bernard Le Bovier de Fontenelle
The universe is but a watch on a larger scale; all its motions depending on determined laws and mutual relation of its parts.

Bernard Le Bovier de Fontenelle
The calculus is to mathematics no more than what experiment is to physics, and all the truths produced solely by the calculus can be treated as truths of experiment.

Bernard Le Bovier de Fontenelle
Astronomy was the daughter of idleness, geometry the daughter of interest; and if we did but examine poetry, we should certainly find her to be the daughter of love.

Bernard Le Bovier de Fontenelle
A work of morality, politics, criticism will be more elegant, other things being equal, if it is shaped by the hand of geometry.

Bernard Le Bovier de Fontenelle
Since the princes have seized on the earth, it is fit the philosophers (who are as proud as the best of them) should reserve the heavens for themselves, without any competitors.

Bernard Le Bovier de Fontenelle
You must go a great way to prove that the Earth may be a Planet, the Planets so many Earths, and all the Stars Worlds.

Bernard Le Bovier de Fontenelle
There is but one sure road of access to truth - the road of cooperative inquiry operating by means of observation, experiment, record, and controlled reflection.

Bernard Le Bovier de Fontenelle
Light is made up of certain little balls, which rebound from what is solid, and return obliquely; but pass thro' what admits of an entrance in a right line, as air or glass: so that what makes the moon enlighten us, is, that she is a firm and solid body, from which the little balls rebound.

Bernard Le Bovier de Fontenelle
'Tis no easy matter to be able to make an Experiment with accuracy. The least fact, which offers itself to our consideration, takes in so many other facts, which modify or compose it, that it requires the utmost dexterity to lay open the several branches of its composition, and no less sagacity to find 'em out.

Bernard Le Bovier de Fontenelle
You see that whiteness in the sky, which some call the milky-way; can you imagine what that is? Why, it is nothing but infinity of small stars, not to be seen by our eyes, because they are so very little; and they are sown so thick, one by another, that they seem to be one continued whiteness: I wish you had a glass to see this ant's nest of stars.

Bernard Le Bovier de Fontenelle
Nothing proves more clearly that the mind seeks truth, and nothing reflects more glory upon it, than the delight it takes, sometimes in spite of itself, in the driest and thorniest researches of algebra.

Bernard Le Bovier de Fontenelle
How vast then! And beyond all reckoning, and beyond all mensuration must the spaces of the universe be!

Bernard Le Bovier de Fontenelle
We must believe that all the sciences are so interconnected, that it is much easier to study them all together than to isolate one from all the others. If, therefore, anyone wishes to search out the truth of things in serious earnest, he ought not to select one special science; for all the sciences are cojoined with each other and interdependent..

Bernard Le Bovier de Fontenelle
There is in mathematics, so to speak, only what we have placed there, only the clearest ideas that the human mind can form of magnitude, compared with one another and combined in an infinity of different ways, while Nature could well have used in the construction of the universe some mechanics that escapes us entirely.

Bernard Le Bovier de Fontenelle
'Tis no easy matter to be able to make an Experiment with accuracy. The least fact, which offers itself to our consideration, takes in so many other facts, which modify or compose it, that it requires the utmost dexterity to lay open the several branches of its composition, and no less sagacity to find 'em out.

Bernard Le Bovier de Fontenelle
There is no need of fance... do but trust your eyes, and you will easily perceive how nature diversifies her works in these several worlds.

Bernard Le Bovier de Fontenelle
We do not yet pretend to have discovered all things, or that what we have discovered can receive no addition; and therefore, pray let us agree, there are yet many things to be done in the ages to come.

Bernard Le Bovier de Fontenelle
One knows the value of pleasure only after he has suffered pain.

Bernard Le Bovier de Fontenelle
Men may say of marriage and women what they please: they will renounce neither the one nor the other.

Bernard Le Bovier de Fontenelle
Behold a universe so immense that I am lost in it. I no longer know where I am. I am just nothing at all. Our world is terrifying in its insignificance.

Bernard Le Bovier de Fontenelle
To amuse the public: what a sad vocation for a man who thinks!

Bernard Le Bovier de Fontenelle
Do you believe that you have humiliated me by teaching me that the earth goes round the sun? I swear to you that my self-esteem has not diminished on that account.

Bernard Le Bovier de Fontenelle
The history of the thoughts of men, curious on account of their infinite variety, is also sometimes instructive.

Bernard Le Bovier de Fontenelle
Modesty in women has great advantages: it enhances beauty, and serves as a veil to uncomeliness.

Bernard Le Bovier de Fontenelle