Johannes Kepler Quotes

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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
If there are globes in the heaven similar to our Earth, do we vie with them over who occupies the better portion of the universe? For if their globes are nobler, we are not the noblest of rational creatures. Then how can all things be for man's sake? How can we be the master of God's handiwork?

Johannes Kepler
It is true that a divine voice, which enjoins humans to study astronomy, is expressed in the world itself, not in words or syllables, but in things themselves and in the conformity of the human intellect and senses with the sequence of celestial bodies and their disposition.

Johannes Kepler
The very truth, and the nature of things, though repudiated and ordered into exile, sneaked in again through the back door, to be received by me under an unwonted guise.

Johannes Kepler
Provide ship or sails adapted to the heavenly breezes, and there will be some who will not fear even that void.... So, for those who will come shortly to attempt this journey, let us establish the astronomy: Galileo, you of Jupiter, I of the moon.

Johannes Kepler
As in every discipline, so in astronomy, too, the conclusions that we teach the reader are seriously intended, and our discussion is no mere game.

Johannes Kepler
The closer I approach her [Nature], the more petulant her games become, and the more she again and again sneaks out of the seeker's grasp just when he is about to seize her through some circuitous route. Nevertheless, she never ceases to invite me to seize her, as though delighting in my mistakes.

Johannes Kepler
I am well aware how fond you are of Nothing, not so much for low price as for the sport, as delightful as it is witty, that it affords your pert sparrow; and so I can really guess that the closer a gift comes to Nothing the more welcome and acceptable it will be to you.

Johannes Kepler
There are as many comets in the sky as fishes in the ocean...

Johannes Kepler
Indeed I reply in a single word to the sentiments of the saints on these questions about nature; in theology, to be sure, the force of authorities is to be weighed, in philosophy, however, that of causes. Therefore, a saint is Lactantius, who denied the rotundity of the earth; a saint is Augustine, who, admitting the rotundity, yet denied the antipodes; worthy of sainthood is the dutiful performance of moderns who, admitting the meagreness of the earth, yet deny its motion. But truth is more saintly for me, who demonstrate by philosophy, without violating my due respect for the doctors of the church, that the earth is both round and inhabited at the antipodes, and of the most despicable size, and finally is moved among the stars.

Johannes Kepler
Yet in this my stars were not Mercury as morning star in the angle of the seventh house, in quartile with Mars, but they were Copernicus, they were Tycho Brahe, without whose books of observations everything which has now been brought by me into the brightest daylight would lie buried in darkness.

Johannes Kepler
Wherever there are qualities there are likewise quantities, but not always vice versa.

Johannes Kepler
If the earth were not round, heavy bodies would not tend from every side in a straight line towards the center of the earth, but to different points from different sides.

Johannes Kepler
But although the attractive virtue of the earth extends upwards, as has been said, so very far, yet if any stone should be at a distance great enough to become sensible compared with the earth's diameter, it is true that on the motion of the earth such a stone would not follow altogether; its own force of resistance would be combined with the attractive force of the earth, and thus it would extricate itself in some degree from the motion of the earth.

Johannes Kepler
I also ask you my friends not to condemn me entirely to the mill of mathematical calculations, and allow me time for philosophical speculations, my only pleasures.

Johannes Kepler
Just as the eye was made to see colours, and the ear to hear sounds, so the human mind was made to understand, not whatever you please, but quantity.

Johannes Kepler
Repudiating the sensible world, which he neither sees himself nor believes from those who have, the Peripatetic joins combat by childish quibbling in a world on paper, and denies the Sun shines because he himself is blind.

Johannes Kepler
I was almost driven to madness in considering and calculating this matter. I could not find out why the planet would rather go on an elliptical orbit. Oh, ridiculous me! As the liberation in the diameter could not also be the way to the ellipse. So this notion brought me up short, that the ellipse exists because of the liberation. With reasoning derived from physical principles, agreeing with experience, there is no figure left for the orbit of the planet but a perfect ellipse.

Johannes Kepler
If the earth should cease to attract its waters to itself all the waters of the sea would be raised and would flow to the body of the moon.

Johannes Kepler
God gives every animal the means of saving its life—why object if he gives astrology to the astronomer?

Johannes Kepler
The soul of the newly born baby is marked for life by the pattern of the stars at the moment it comes into the world, unconsciously remembers it, and remains sensitive to the return of configurations of a similar kind.

Johannes Kepler
Of a number of variant hypotheses about the same facts, that one is true which shows why facts, which in the other hypotheses remain unrelated, are as they are, i. e., which demonstrates their orderly and rational mathematical connexion.

Johannes Kepler
I wanted to become a theologian; for a long time I was unhappy. Now, behold, God is praised by my work even in astronomy.

Johannes Kepler
Since geometry is co-eternal with the divine mind before the birth of things, God himself served as his own model in creating the world (for what is there in God which is not God?), and he with his own image reached down to humanity.

Johannes Kepler
So, Fabricius, I already have this: that the most true path of the planet [Mars] is an ellipse, which Dürer also calls an oval, or certainly so close to an ellipse that the difference is insensible.

Johannes Kepler
The sphere of the attractive virtue which is in the moon extends as far as the earth, and entices up the waters; but as the moon flies rapidly across the zenith, and the waters cannot follow so quickly, a flow of the ocean is occasioned in the torrid zone towards the westward.

Johannes Kepler
I am a Lutheran astrologer, I throw away the nonsense and keep the hard kernel.

Johannes Kepler
Geometry, which before the origin of things was coeternal with the divine mind and is God himself (for what could there be in God which would not be God himself?), supplied God with patterns for the creation of the world, and passed over to Man along with the image of God; and was not in fact taken in through the eyes.

Johannes Kepler
Nothing which consists of corporeal matter is absolutely light, but that is comparatively lighter which is rarer, either by its own nature, or by accidental heat. And it is not to be thought that light bodies are escaping to the surface of the universe while they are carried upwards, or that they are not attracted by the earth. They are attracted, but in a less degree, and so are driven outwards by the heavy bodies; which being done, they stop, and are kept by the earth in their own place.

Johannes Kepler