Astronomy Quotes - Page 8

• Interviewer: "Didn't [Sagan] want to believe?" Druyan: "He didn't want to believe. He wanted to know.

  Ann Druyan

  Believe, Atheism, Want

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• At the Egyptian city of Naucratis there was a famous old god whose name was Theuth; the bird which is called the Ibis was sacred to him, and he was the inventor of many arts, such as arithmetic and calculation and geometry and astronomy and draughts and dice, but his great discovery was the use of letters.

  Plato

  Art, Science, Discovery

  Plato (2010). “The Works of Plato: The Trial and Death of Socrates”, p.442, Cosimo, Inc.

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• Theories crumble, but good observations never fade.

  Harlow Shapley

  Theory, Observation, Cosmology

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• Let me arrest thy thoughts, wonder with me,
  Why ploughing, building, ruling and the rest,
  Or most of those arts, whence our lives are blessed,
  By cursed Cain's race invented be,
  And blessed Seth vexed us with astronomy.

  John Donne

  Art, Science, Race

  "John Donne: The Major Works".

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• Computer science has as much to do with computers as astronomy has to do with telescopes.

  Edsger Dijkstra

  Telescopes, Computer, Computer Science

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• Many a man, brought up in the glib profession of some shallow form of Christianity, who comes through reading Astronomy to realize for the first time how majestically indifferent most reality is to man, and who perhaps abandons his religion on that account, may at that moment be having his first genuinely religious experience.

  C. S. Lewis

  Religious, Reading, Reality

  C. S. Lewis (1996). “Miracles: A Preliminary Study”, Touchstone Books

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• I can see the use and value of religion, just as I can see the use of mud wrestling, yoga, astronomy and sadomasochism. but I reject the idea that you can't be a deep human being without it or any of them.

  Brian Eno

  Yoga, Wrestling, Ideas

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• System debugging has always been a graveyard-shift occupation, like astronomy.

  Fred Brooks

  Debugging, Occupation, Graveyard

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• The Babylonian and Assyrian civilizations have perished; Hammurabi, Sargon and Nebuchadnezzar are empty names; yet Babylonian mathematics is still interesting, and the Babylonian scale of 60 is still used in Astronomy.

  G. H. Hardy

  Science, Civilization, Names

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• Do you believe in astrology? -I don't even believe in astronomy.

  Peter De Vries

  Believe, Astrology

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• Laplace considers astronomy a science of observation, because we can only observe the movements of the planets; we cannot reach them, indeed, to alter their course and to experiment with them. "On earth," said Laplace, "we make phenomena vary by experiments; in the sky, we carefully define all the phenomena presented to us by celestial motion." Certain physicians call medicine a science of observations, because they wrongly think that experimentation is inapplicable to it.

  Claude Bernard

  Science, Thinking, Sky

  Claude Bernard (2012). “An Introduction to the Study of Experimental Medicine”, p.47, Courier Corporation

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• Mr. Dalton's permanent reputation will rest upon his having discovered a simple principle, universally applicable to the facts of chemistry - in fixing the proportions in which bodies combine, and thus laying the foundation for future labors... his merits in this respect resemble those of Kepler in astronomy.

  Humphry Davy

  Simple, Foundation, Principles

  Sir Humphry Davy (1840). “The Collected Works of Sir Humphry Davy: Discourses delivered before the Royal Society, and Agricultural lectures, pt. 1”

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• I may remind you that history is not a branch of literature. The facts of history, like the facts of geology or astronomy, can supply material for literary art; for manifest reasons they lend themselves to artistic representation far more readily than those of the natural sciences; but to clothe the story of human society in a literary dress is no more the part of a historian as a historian, than it is the part of an astronomer as an astronomer to present in an artistic shape the story of the stars.

  J. B. Bury

  Art, Stars, Dresses

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• After two years of undergraduate study, it was clear that I was bored by the regime of problem-solving required by the Cambridge mathematical tripos. A very sensitive mathematics don recommended that I talk to the historian of astronomy, Michael Hoskin, and the conversation led me to enroll in the History and Philosophy of Science for my final undergraduate year.

  Philip Kitcher

  Philosophy, Years, Two

  Source: www.3ammagazine.com

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• The physical doctrine of the atom has got into a state which is strongly suggestive of the epicycles of astronomy before Copernicus .

  Alfred North Whitehead

  Atoms, Doctrine, Copernicus

  Alfred North Whitehead (1997). “Science and the Modern World”, p.131, Simon and Schuster

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• I have enormous respect for Derek Parfit, although he seems to me bound within an unfortunate philosophical tradition - rather like the extraordinarily brilliant exponents of Ptolemaic astronomy in the Middle Ages.

  Philip Kitcher

  Philosophical, Age, Brilliant

  Source: www.3ammagazine.com

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• Looking back, it didn't even occur to me that model was a job. I wanted to go into astronomy or to be a lawyer, which is really funny because I would absolutely not be a lawyer in any way now. But I still like astronomy.

  Crystal Renn

  Lawyer, Looking Back

  Source: www.interviewmagazine.com

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• If astronomy teaches anything, it teaches that man is but a detail in the evolution of the universe, and the resemblant though diverse details are inevitably to be expected in the hosts of orbs around him. He learns that, though he will probably never find his double anywhere, he is destined to discover any number of cousins scattered through space.

  Percival Lowell

  Cousin, Men, Numbers

  Percival Lowell (2006). “Mars (Large Print)”, p.154, ReadHowYouWant.com

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• Man is slightly nearer to the atom than to the star. ... From his central position man can survey the grandest works of Nature with the astronomer, or the minutest works with the physicist. ... [K]nowledge of the stars leads through the atom; and important knowledge of the atom has been reached through the stars.

  Arthur Eddington

  Nature, Stars, Science

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• My picture of the world is drawn in perspective and not like a model to scale. The foreground is occupied by human beings and the stars are all as small as three-penny bits. I don't really believe in astronomy, except as a complicated description of part of the course of human and possibly animal sensation. I apply my perspective not merely to space but also to time. In time the world will cool and everything will die; but that is a long time off still and its present value at compound discount is almost nothing.

  Frank P. Ramsey

  Stars, Believe, Science

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• who knows if the moon's a balloon,coming out of a keen city in the sky--filled with pretty people? ( and if you and I should get into it,if they should take me and take you into their balloon, why then we'd go up higher with all the pretty people than houses and steeples and clouds: go sailing away and away sailing into a keen city which nobody's ever visited,where always it's Spring)and everyone's in love and flowers pick themselves

  e. e. cummings

  Spring, Flower, Moon

  E. E. Cummings (1996). “Tulips and Chimneys”, p.172, W. W. Norton & Company

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• The so-called Christian nations are the most enlightened and progressive ... but in spite of their religion, not because of it. The Church has opposed every innovation and discovery from the day of Galileo down to our own time, when the use of anesthetic in childbirth was regarded as a sin because it avoided the biblical curse pronounced against Eve. And every step in astronomy and geology ever taken has been opposed by bigotry and superstition. The Greeks surpassed us in artistic culture and in architecture five hundred years before Christian religion was born.

  Mark Twain

  Christian, Taken, Biblical

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• And when you look at the sky you know you are looking at stars which are hundreds and thousands of light-years away from you. And some of the stars don’t even exist anymore because their light has taken so long to get to us that they are already dead, or they have exploded and collapsed into red dwarfs. And that makes you seem very small, and if you have difficult things in you life it is nice to think that they are what is called negligible, which means they are so small you don’t have to take them into account when you are calculating something.

  Mark Haddon

  Stars, Nice, Taken

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• Until 1930 or thereabout biologists [using microscopes], in the situation of Astronomers and Astrophysicists, were permitted to see the objects of their interest, but not to touch them; the cell was as distant from us, as the stars and galaxies were from them.

  Albert Claude

  Stars, Science, Cells

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• We ever long for visions of beauty,
  We ever dream of unknown worlds.

  Maxim Gorky

  Dream, Unknown Worlds, Long

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