Maria Mitchell Quotes

55 Sourced Quotes

I am always the better for open-air breathing, and was certainly meant for the wandering life of the Indian.

Maria Mitchell
I would as soon put a girl alone into a closet to meditate as give her only the society of her needle.

Maria Mitchell
Every formula which expresses a law of nature is a hymn of praise to God.

Maria Mitchell
We especially need imagination in science. It is not all mathematics, nor all logic, but it is somewhat beauty and poetry. There will come with the greater love of science greater love to one another. Living more nearly to Nature is living farther from the world and from its follies, but nearer to the world's people; it is to be of them, with them, and for them, and especially for their improvement. We cannot see how impartially Nature gives of her riches to all, without loving all, and helping all; and if we cannot learn through Nature's laws the certainty of spiritual truths, we can at least learn to promote spiritual growth while we are together, and live in a trusting hope of a greater growth in the future.

Maria Mitchell
We travel to learn; and I have never been in any country where they did not do something better than we do it, think some thoughts better than we think, catch some inspiration from heights above our own.

Maria Mitchell
The Southern character is opposed to haste. Safety is of more worth than speed, and there is no hurry.

Maria Mitchell
There is a God, and he is good, I say to myself. I try to increase my trust in this, my only article of creed.

Maria Mitchell
There is something of the same pleasure in noticing the hues of the stars that there is in looking at a flower garden in autumn.

Maria Mitchell
The great gain would be freedom of thought. Women, more than men, are bound by tradition and authority. What the father, the brother, the doctor, and the minister have said has been received undoubtingly. Until women throw off this reverence for authority they will not develop. When they do this, when they come to truth through their investigations, when doubt leads them to discovery, the truth which they get will be theirs, and their minds will work on and on unfettered.

Maria Mitchell
The eye that directs a needle in the delicate meshes of embroidery will equally well bisect a star with the spiderweb of the micrometer.

Maria Mitchell
We may turn our gaze [to other stars] as we turn a kaleidoscope, and the changes are infinitely more startling, the combinations infinitely more beautiful; no flower garden presents such a variety and such delicacy of shades.

Maria Mitchell
Not too much mechanical apparatus - let the imagination have some play; a cube maybe shown by a model, but let the drawing upon the blackboard represent the cube; and if possible let Nature be the blackboard; spread your triangles upon land and sky.

Maria Mitchell
To read a book, to think it over, and to write out notes is a useful exercise; a book which will not repay some hard thought is not worth publishing.

Maria Mitchell
The laws which regulate the influence of sun and planets are complex; the nature of the influence is not yet understood. The telescope, the spectroscope, and the camera are all at work, and although the unknown must always be infinite, Nature yields one truth after another to the earnest seeker.

Maria Mitchell
I saw, in looking over Cooper, elements of a comet of 1825 which resemble what I get out for this, from my own observations, but I cannot rely upon my own.

Maria Mitchell
You cannot get a man of genius to explain steps, he leaps.

Maria Mitchell
Our faculty meetings always try me in this respect: we do things that other colleges have done before. We wait and ask for precedent. If the earth had waited for a precedent, it never would have turned on its axis!

Maria Mitchell
A young sailor boy came to see me to-day. It pleases me to have these lads seek me on their return from their first voyage, and tell me how much they have learned about navigation.

Maria Mitchell
A meteor seems to come like a messenger from departed spirits.

Maria Mitchell
We call the stars garnet and sapphire; but these are, at best, vague terms. Our language has not terms enough to signify the different delicate shades; our factories have not the stuff whose hues might make a chromatic scale for them.

Maria Mitchell
People have to learn sometimes not only how much the heart, but how much the head, can bear.

Maria Mitchell
The true scientist must be self-forgetting. He knows that under the best circumstances he is sowing what others must reap — or rather he is striking the mine which others must open up — for human life at longest has not the measure of a single breath in the long life of science.

Maria Mitchell
But why look back at all? Why turn your eyes to your shadow, when, by looking upward, you see your rainbow in the same direction?

Maria Mitchell
The astronomy which is not mathematical is what is so ludicrously called "Geography of the Heavens" - is not astronomy at all.

Maria Mitchell
No woman should say, 'I am but a woman!' But a woman! What more can you ask to be?

Maria Mitchell