Maria Mitchell Quotes

55 Sourced Quotes

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

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

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

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
I have worn myself thin trying to find out about this comet, and I know very little now in the matter.

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
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
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
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
There is this great danger in student life. Now, we rest all upon what Socrates said, or what Copernicus taught; how can we dispute authority which has come down to us, all established, for ages? We must at least question it; we cannot accept anything as granted, beyond the first mathematical formulae. Question everything else.

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
Do not forget the infinite in the infinitesimal.

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
The chemist should have had a laboratory, and the observatory should have had an astronomer; but we are too apt to bestow money where there is no man, and to find a man where there is no money.

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
Newton rolled up the cover of a book; he put a small glass at one end, and a large brain at the other - it was enough.

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
When we are chaffed and fretted by small cares, a look at the stars will show us the littleness of our own interests.

Maria Mitchell
Nothing comes out more clearly in astronomical observations than the immense activity of the universe.

Maria Mitchell
But star-gazing is not science. The entrance to astronomy is through mathematics.

Maria Mitchell
There is no observatory in this land, nor in any land, probably, of which the question is not asked, "Are they doing anything? Why don't we hear from them? They should make discoveries, they should publish."

Maria Mitchell