Cecilia Payne-Gaposchkin Quotes

5 Sourced Quotes

Your reward will be the widening of the horizon as you climb. And if you achieve that reward you will ask no other.

Cecilia Payne-Gaposchkin

There is nothing personal in the thunderclap of understanding. The lightning that releases it comes from outside oneself.

Cecilia Payne-Gaposchkin

To realize one's limitations marks the awakening of intellectual integrity, without which imagination, integrity and assiduity are barren.

Cecilia Payne-Gaposchkin

The constellations carry us back to the dawn of astronomy. They have been called the fossil remains of primitive stellar religion, and as such they have extraordinary interest.

Cecilia Payne-Gaposchkin

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

Cecilia Payne-Gaposchkin

Cecilia Payne-Gaposchkin

Creative Commons

Born: May 10, 1900

Died: December 7, 1979 (aged 79)

Bio: Cecilia Helena Payne-Gaposchkin was a British American astronomer and astrophysicist who, in 1925, proposed in her Ph.D. thesis an explanation for the composition of stars in terms of the relative abundances of hydrogen and helium.

Known for:

The Stars of High Luminosity
Stars in the Making (1952)
Stars and Clusters (1979)

Cecilia Payne-Gaposchkin on Wikipedia

Suggest an edit or a new quote

American Astronomer Quotes

Astronomer Quotes

20th-century Astronomer Quotes

20th-century Women

Women Astronomers