Johannes Kepler Quotes

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Truth is the daughter of time, and I feel no shame in being her midwife.

Johannes Kepler
I much prefer the sharpest criticism of a single intelligent man to the thoughtless approval of the masses.

Johannes Kepler
We do not ask for what useful purpose the birds do sing, for song is their pleasure since they were created for singing. Similarly, we ought not to ask why the human mind troubles to fathom the secrets of the heavens. The diversity of the phenomena of nature is so great and the treasures hidden in the heavens so rich precisely in order that the human mind shall never be lacking in fresh nourishment.

Johannes Kepler
Some things will be said which time will prove, but many things will be refuted by time and experience as vain and worthless; as is customary with the people, the latter will be committed to the winds, and the former, entirely to memory.

Johannes Kepler
[the] motions [of Mars] provide the only possible access to the hidden secrets of astronomy, without which we would remain forever ignorant of those secrets.

Johannes Kepler
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
Why waste words? Geometry existed before the Creation, is co-eternal with the mind of God, is God himself (what exists in God that is not God himself?): geometry provided God with a model for the Creation and was implanted into man, together with God's own likeness — and not merely conveyed to his mind through the eyes.

Johannes Kepler
Depend upon it, the universe will never really be understood unless it may be sometime resolved into an ordered multiplicity and made to own itself an everlasting drama of the calculus.

Johannes Kepler
Some physical causes are recognized by all; others, by only very few people; indeed, many things exist naturally, but from causes hitherto known to no man. And of the causes, which we know, there are some whose kind and nature we all usually understand, and others whose kind or indirect cause are understood by very few people, or by nobody.

Johannes Kepler
I am much occupied with the investigation of physical causes. My aim in this is to show that the celestial machine is to be likened not to a divine organism, but rather a clockwork...

Johannes Kepler
The testimony of the ages confirm that the motions of the planets are orbicular.

Johannes Kepler
This very cogitation carries with it I don't know what secret, hidden horror; indeed one finds oneself wandering in this immensity to which are denied limits and centre and therefore also all determinate places.

Johannes Kepler
The chief aim of all investigations of the external world should be to discover the rational order and harmony which has been imposed on it by God and which He revealed to us in the language of mathematics.

Johannes Kepler
As soon as somebody demonstrates the art of flying, settlers from our species of man will not be lacking on the moon and Jupiter... Given ships or sails adapted to the breezes of heaven, there will be those who will not shrink from even that vast expanse.

Johannes Kepler
Astronomy has two ends, to save the appearances and to contemplate the true form of the edifice of the world.

Johannes Kepler
If there is anything that can bind the heavenly mind of man to this dreary exile of our earthly home and can reconcile us with our fate so than one can enjoy living, — then it is verily the enjoyment of the mathematical sciences and astronomy.

Johannes Kepler
For astronomers ought not simply to enjoy a licence of making any fictions they choose without rational grounds.

Johannes Kepler
Prolixity of phrases has it own obscurity, no less than terse brevity. The latter evades the mind's eye while the former distracts it; the one lacks the light while the other overwhelms with superfluous glitter; the latter does not arouse the sight while the former quite dazzles it.

Johannes Kepler
I measured the skies, now the shadows I measure Skybound was the mind, Earthbound the body rests.

Johannes Kepler
Every year, especially since 1563, the number of writings published in every field is greater than all those produced in the past thousand years. Through them there has today been created a new theology and a new jurisprudence; the Paracelsians have created medicine anew and the Copernicans have created astronomy anew. I really believe that at last the world is alive, indeed seething, and that the stimuli of these remarkable conjunctions did not act in vain.

Johannes Kepler
After the birth of printing books became widespread. Hence everyone throughout Europe devoted himself to the study of literature. Hence many universities came into existence, and at once so many learned men appeared that the authority of those who clung to barbarism soon declined.

Johannes Kepler
The Earth sings Mi-Fa-Mi, so we can gather ever from this that Misery and Famine reign in our habitat.

Johannes Kepler
So long as the mother, Ignorance, lives, it is not safe for Science, the offspring, to divulge the hidden causes of things.

Johannes Kepler
He who will please the crowd and for the sake of the most ephemeral renown will either proclaim those things which nature does not display or even will publish genuine miracles of nature without regard to deeper causes is a spiritually corrupt person… With the best of intentions I publicly speak to the crowd (which is eager for things new) on the subject of what is to come.

Johannes Kepler
Every corporeal substance, so far forth as it is corporeal, has a natural fitness for resting in every place where it may be situated by itself beyond the sphere of influence of a body cognate with it.

Johannes Kepler
Gravity is a mutual affection between cognate bodies towards union or conjunction (similar in kind to the magnetic virtue), so that the earth attracts a stone much rather than the stone seeks the earth.

Johannes Kepler
I used to measure the Heavens, now I measure the shadows of Earth. The mind belonged to Heaven, the body's shadow lies here.

Johannes Kepler
Either... the moving intelligences of the planets are weakest in those that are farthest from the sun, or... there is one moving intelligence in the sun, the common center, forcing them all round, but those most violently which are nearest, and that it languishes in some sort and grows weaker at the most distant, because of the remoteness and the attenuation of the virtue.

Johannes Kepler
If the attractive virtue of the moon extends as far as the earth, it follows with greater reason that the attractive virtue of the earth extends as far as the moon and much farther; and, in short, nothing which consists of earthly substance anyhow constituted although thrown up to any height, can ever escape the powerful operation of this attractive virtue.

Johannes Kepler
There are, in fact, as I began to say above, not a few principles which are the special property of mathematics, such principles as are discovered by the common light of nature, require no demonstration, and which concern quantities primarily; then they are applied to other things, so far as the latter have something in common with quantities. Now there are more of these principles in mathematics than in the other theoretical sciences because of that very characteristic of the human understanding which seems to be such from the law of creation, that nothing can be known completely except quantities or by quantities. And so it happens that the conclusions of mathematics are most certain and indubitable.

Johannes Kepler