Richard Anthony Proctor Quotes

22 Sourced Quotes

On a calm, clear night... the contemplation of the celestial vault raises in the least thoughtful mind vague suggestions of infinity, eternity, and omnipotence.

Richard Anthony Proctor
Science deals with the finite though it may carry our thoughts to the infinite.

Richard Anthony Proctor
The geologist has been able to turn back a few leaves of the earth's past history, and, though the pages have been defaced and mutilated by Time's unsparing hand, he is yet able to read in them of many strange vicissitudes to which the continents and oceans of our globe have been exposed.

Richard Anthony Proctor
Among the many striking contrasts between the seeming and the real suggested by the study of astronomy, there is none more startling than the contrast which exists between the apparent repose of the heavens and what is really taking place among the star depths.

Richard Anthony Proctor
Larger and larger grew the universe... as men turned more and more powerful, more and more exact instruments to the survey of the heavens.

Richard Anthony Proctor
Our earth is as a minute island placed within the ocean of space, and to the shores of this tiny isle the light-waves bear their messages from the orbs which lie like other isles amid the fathomless depths around us.

Richard Anthony Proctor
The ideas entertained by the non-scientific public regarding the extent and nature of the researches made by astronomers into the constitution of the heavens, are, for the most part, singularly inaccurate.

Richard Anthony Proctor
So far as Science is concerned, the idea of a personal God is inconceivable...

Richard Anthony Proctor
We have learned how small is our domain in space, but as yet we have scarcely been willing to admit that man's duration in time is as utterly minute, and in a sense insignificant.

Richard Anthony Proctor
It is not simply the vast in which men have learned to believe, not mere immensity, but the mystery of absolute infinity. On all sides our island home [Earth] is surrounded by a shoreless sea of space.

Richard Anthony Proctor
Astronomy is of all others the science which seems to present to us the most striking instance of waste.

Richard Anthony Proctor
As an astronomer in the true sense of the term, Sir John Herschel stood before all his contemporaries. Nay, he stood almost alone.

Richard Anthony Proctor
Although the astronomer has achieved many successes in studying comets, yet these objects still remain outside the surveyed fields of astronomy - now, as in the old days when men spoke of sun and moon, planet and stars, as including all the members of the heavenly host.

Richard Anthony Proctor
Although the problem of transmuting chemical elements into each other is much older than a satisfactory definition of the very concept of chemical element, it is well known that the first and most important step towards its solution was made only nineteen years ago by the late Lord Rutherford, who started the method of the nuclear bombardments.

Richard Anthony Proctor
If the interstellar depths are crowded with meteor flights, we have to ask whence the meteor flights came. To say that fish which have been drawn from the sea were originally swimming about in the sea, is surely not to add much to our knowledge about fish.

Richard Anthony Proctor
He quotes a passage... without comment, but, unfortunately, not without serious alteration.

Richard Anthony Proctor
When we work long at a thing and come to know it up and down, in and out, through and through, it becomes in quite a remarkable way translucent.

Richard Anthony Proctor
Many think that science cannot truly be called science if clothed in poetic garb, and, on the other hand, others seem to fear that a glory must depart from the face of nature if science scrutinise her mysteries too closely.

Richard Anthony Proctor
If there is any object which men can properly take as an emblem of the power and goodness of Almighty God, it is the sun.

Richard Anthony Proctor
Men found more and more of mystery as they learned more and more of actual facts, until now that which of old was confidently explained is found to be utterly inexplicable, save as a part - an infinitely minute part - of the mysterious Infinity and Eternity we call The Universe.

Richard Anthony Proctor
An air of mystery surrounds his researches, lying, as they do, chiefly in depths to which the far-seeing eye of the telescope alone penetrates.

Richard Anthony Proctor
The whole system has been long since swept away, and its records merely remain as illustrations of perverted ingenuity.

Richard Anthony Proctor