Galileo Galilei Quotes

74 Sourced Quotes

If you could see the earth illuminated when you were in a place as dark as night, it would look to you more splendid than the moon.

Galileo Galilei
It is enough to hold a stone in your hand. The universe would have been equally incomprehensible if it had only consisted of that one stone the size of an orange. The question would be just as impenetrable: Where did this stone come from.

Galileo Galilei
It is astonishing and incredible to us, but not to Nature; for she performs with utmost ease and simplicity things which are even infinitely puzzling to our minds, and what is very difficult for us to comprehend is quite easy for her to perform.

Galileo Galilei
This [experimentation] is the custom—and properly so—in those sciences where mathematical demonstrations are applied to natural phenomena, as is seen in the case of perspective, astronomy, mechanics, music, and others where the principles, once established by well-chosen experiments, become the foundations of the entire superstructure.

Galileo Galilei
For my part I consider the earth very noble and admirable precisely because of the diverse alterations, changes, generations, etc. that occur in it incessantly.

Galileo Galilei
The book of nature is written in the language of mathematics.

Galileo Galilei
Surely it is a great thing to increase the numerous host of fixed stars previously visible to the unaided vision, adding countless more which have never before been seen, exposing these plainly to the eye in numbers ten times exceeding the old and familiar stars.

Galileo Galilei
Alas! Your dear friend and servant Galileo has been for the last month hopelessly blind; so that this heaven, this earth, this universe, which I by my marvelous discoveries and clear demonstrations had enlarged a hundred thousand times beyond the belief of the wise men of bygone ages, henceforward for me is shrunk into such a small space as is filled by my own bodily sensations.

Galileo Galilei
I would say here something that was heard from an ecclesiastic of the most eminent degree [Cardinal Baronius]: 'That the intention of the holy ghost is to teach us how one goes to heaven, not how heaven goes.'

Galileo Galilei
The universe has no timeless geography. The universe is a happening.

Galileo Galilei
It is surely harmful to souls to make it a heresy to believe what is proved. The prohibition of astronomy would be an open contempt of a hundred texts of the Holy Scriptures, which teach us that the glory and the greatness of Almighty God are admirably discerned in all His works, and divinely read in the open book of the heavens.

Galileo Galilei
Where the senses fail us, reason must step in...

Galileo Galilei
To apply oneself to great inventions, starting from the smallest beginnings, is no task for ordinary minds; to divine that wonderful arts lie hid behind trivial and childish things is a conception for superhuman talents.

Galileo Galilei
Surely, God could have caused birds to fly with their bones made of solid gold, with their veins full of quicksilver, with their flesh heavier than lead, and with their wings exceedingly small. He did not, and that ought to show something. It is only in order to shield your ignorance that you put the Lord at every turn to the refuge of a miracle.

Galileo Galilei
In questions of science the authority of a thousand is not worth the humble reasoning of a single individual.

Galileo Galilei
I cannot but be astonished that Sarsi should persist in trying to prove by means of witnesses something that I may see for myself at any time by means of experiment.

Galileo Galilei
If Galileo had said in verse that the world moved, the Inquisition might have let him alone.

Galileo Galilei
What has philosophy got to do with measuring anything? It's the mathematicians you have to trust, and they measure the skies like we measure a field.

Galileo Galilei
I am certainly interested in a tribunal in which, for having used my reason, I was deemed little less than a heretic. Who knows but men will reduce me from the profession of a philosopher to that of historian of the Inquisition! But they behave to me in order that I may become the ignoramus and the fool of Italy...

Galileo Galilei
When the moon is ninety degrees away from the sun it sees but half the earth illuminated (the western half). For the other (the eastern half) is enveloped in night. Hence the moon itself is illuminated less brightly from the earth, and as a result its secondary light appears fainter to us.

Galileo Galilei