Camille Flammarion - Popular Astronomy (1880)

24 Sourced Quotes

View all Camille Flammarion Quotes
The human mind is insatiable for knowledge. It is of its essence to desire to penetrate into the nature of things, and to make conjectures on all points which it cannot thoroughly comprehend.

Camille Flammarion
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
If the comparison were not offensive to the sun-god, we might say that he [the Sun] is like the spider at the centre of his web. In the net of his attraction the worlds are sustained. Relatively to his magnitude and might, the planets are but toys turning round him.

Camille Flammarion
Astronomy is the most accurate of the sciences. All the truths which it teaches are absolutely demonstrated, and cannot be disputed by any mind which gives itself the trouble, or rather the pleasure, to gain information in the study of this admirable science.

Camille Flammarion
Thus perpetual motion bears the world along! The sun moves through space; the earth moves round him, letting herself be carried along in his flight; the moon moves, circulating round us, while we gravitate round the radiant hearth which precipitates itself into the eternal void.

Camille Flammarion
Orb of dream and mystery, pale sun of the night, solitary globe wandering in the silent firmament, the moon has in all times and among all nations peculiarly attracted attention and thought.

Camille Flammarion
The dial of the heavens is eternal, and the inexorable hand which slowly marks their destinies shall turn forever. It is we who say yesterday or to-morrow. For nature it is always today.

Camille Flammarion
What inexhaustible variety distinguishes the planets from each other!

Camille Flammarion
It has been said that nature has implanted in our bosoms a craving after the discovery of truth, and assuredly that glorious instinct is never more irresistibly awakened than when our notice is directed to what is going on in the heavens.

Camille Flammarion
Without an atmosphere, without this gaseous envelope whence organised beings incessantly draw what nourishes their own existence, it is impossible for us to conceive anything but immobility and the silence of death.

Camille Flammarion
As changeable as the iridescent bubble which the breath of a child blows by the aid of a simple drop of soapy water, and allows to fly away through the air in the rays of the cheerful sun, the terrestrial globe floats in space - the veritable sport of cosmical forces which carry it whirling through the vast heavens.

Camille Flammarion
The earth appears to us as an immense plain, chequered with a thousand varieties of aspects and reliefs - verdant hills, flowery valleys, mountains more or less elevated, winding rivers in the plains, lakes of fresh water, vast oceans, countries of infinite variety.

Camille Flammarion
Nature is so varied in its modes of action, so multiple in the manisftations of its power, that we have no night to set any limits to its capabilities.

Camille Flammarion
The science of the stars [astronomy] ceases to be the confidential secret of a small number of the initiated; it penetrates all understandings, it illuminates nature.

Camille Flammarion
The study of the earth teaches us to understand the sky, and in the microscopical atom we inhabit the vibrations of the infinite are revealed.

Camille Flammarion
The silent star of night is the first halting-place on a voyage towards the infinite.

Camille Flammarion
Like a shower of stars the worlds whirl, borne along by the winds of heaven, and are carried down through immensity, suns, earths, satellites, comets, shooting stars, humanities, cradles, graves, atoms of the infinite, seconds of eternity, perpetually transform beings and things.

Camille Flammarion
These are lights which glimmer on the frontiers of creation; they are the beginnings which show us the birth of other universes; they are the voices of the past which speak to us from the depths of the vanished ages.

Camille Flammarion
Mathematicians, whose tempers are generally intolerable, are perhaps psychologically excusable, for the constant tension of their mind is, perhaps, the cause of their bad digestion and their state of hypochondria.

Camille Flammarion
Like the eagle which rises higher and higher in the upper regions where the atmosphere itself loses its density, so we sail ourselves over-looking the mysterious horizons of the future.

Camille Flammarion
Eclipses, like comets, have always been interpreted as the indication of inevitable calamities. Human vanity sees the finger of God making signs to us on the least pretext, as if we were the end and aim of universal creation.

Camille Flammarion
The torch of progress was lit and could not be extinguished.

Camille Flammarion
Attempt to understand it! As well might the ant attempt to drink the ocean!

Camille Flammarion
Nature is immense in the little as in the great, or, to speak more correctly, for here there is neither little nor great.

Camille Flammarion