Astronomy Quotes - Page 9

• ...as our friend Zach has often noted, in our days those who do the best for astronomy are not the salaried university professors, but so-called dillettanti, physicians, jurists, and so forth.Lamenting the fragmentary time left to a professor has remaining after fulfilling his teaching duties.

  Carl Friedrich Gauss

  Education, Teaching, Science

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• Combining in our survey then, the whole range of deposits from the most recent to the most ancient group, how striking a succession do they present:- so various yet so uniform-so vast yet so connected. In thus tracing back to the most remote periods in the physical history of our continents, one system of operations, as the means by which many complex formations have been successively produced, the mind becomes impressed with the singleness of nature's laws; and in this respect, at least, geology is hardly inferior in simplicity to astronomy.

  Roderick Murchison

  Nature, Mean, Science

  Roderick Impey Murchison (1839). “The silurian system, founded on geological researches in the counties of Salop, Hereford etc”, p.574

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• An observer situated in a nebula and moving with the nebula will observe the same properties of the universe as any other similarly situated observer at any time.

  Hermann Bondi

  Moving, Nebula, Cosmology

  "Wissenschaft und Symbol". Book by Hermann Friedmann, p. 472, 1949.

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• Mathematics is the queen of sciences and number theory is the queen of mathematics. She often condescends to render service to astronomy and other natural sciences, but in all relations she is entitled to the first rank.

  Carl Friedrich Gauss

  Queens, Numbers, Firsts

  "Gauss zum Gedächtniss". Book by Wolfgang Sartorius von Waltershausen, 1856.

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• Khalif (Caliph) Al-Ma'mun's period of rule (813 - 833 C.E.) may be considered the 'golden age' of science and learning. He had always been devoted to books and to learned pursuits. His brilliant mind was interested in every form of intellectual activity. Not only poetry but also philosophy, theology, astronomy, medicine and law all occupied his time.

  John Bagot Glubb

  Philosophy, Book, Islamic

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• In the progressive growth of astronomy, physics or mechanical science was developed, and when this had been, to a certain degree, successfully cultivated, it gave birth to the science of chemistry.

  Justus von Liebig

  Science, Growth, Degrees

  David M. Knight, Justus von Liebig (1998). “The Development of Chemistry, 1789-1914: Familiar letters on chemistry”, p.2, Taylor & Francis

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• At the age of three I began to look around my grandfather's library. My first knowledge of astronomy came from reading and looking at pictures at that time. By the time I was six I remember him buying books for me. ... I think I was eight, he bought me a three-inch telescope on a brass mounting. ... So, as far back as I can remember, I had an early interest in science in general, astronomy in particular.

  Jesse L. Greenstein

  Book, Reading, Knowledge

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• Realizing how often ingenious speculation in the complex biological world has led nowhere and how often the real advances in biology as well as in chemistry, physics and astronomy have kept within the bounds of mechanistic interpretation, we geneticists should rejoice, even with our noses on the grindstone (which means both eyes on the objectives), that we have at command an additional means of testing whatever original ideas pop into our heads.

  Thomas Hunt Morgan

  Real, Mean, Eye

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• My interest in science was excited at age nine by an article on astronomy in National Geographic; the author was Donald Menzel of the Harvard Observatory. For the next few years, I regularly made star maps and snuck out at night to make observations from a locust tree in our back yard.

  Dudley R. Herschbach

  Stars, Science, Night

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• It is much better to learn the elements of geology, of botany, or ornithology and astronomy by word of mouth from a companion than dully from a book.

  Ralph Waldo Emerson

  Book, Learning, Science

  Ralph Waldo Emerson, Edward Waldo Emerson (1904). “The complete works of Ralph Waldo Emerson”

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• Geology does better in reclothing dry bones and revealing lost creations, than in tracing veins of lead and beds of iron; astronomy better in opening to us the houses of heaven than in teaching navigation; surgery better in investigating organiation than in setting limbs; only it is ordained that, for our encouragement, every step we make in science adds something to its practical applicabilities.

  John Ruskin

  Encouragement, Teaching, Science

  John Ruskin (1907). “The Religion of Ruskin: The Life and Works of John Ruskin; a Biographical and Anthological Study”

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• But just as astronomy succeeded astrology, following Kepler's discovery of planetary regularities, the discoveries of these many principles in empirical explorations of intellectual processes in machines should lead to a science, eventually.

  Marvin Minsky

  Science, Discovery, Astrology

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• Other job markets may lay claim to the title, but astronomy is actually the world's oldest profession.

  Phil Plait

  Jobs, Titles, World

  "Death from the Skies!". Book by Phil Plait, 2008.

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• A high-school girl, seated next to a famous astronomer at a dinner party, struck up a conversation with him by asking: "What do you do for a living?" "I study astronomy," he replied. "Really? said the teenager, wide-eyed. "I finished astronomy last year."

  James Keller

  Life, Girl, Teenager

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• Man carries the world in his head, the whole astronomy and chemistry suspended in a thought. Because the history of nature is charactered in his brain, therefore he is the prophet and discoverer of her secrets. Every known fact in natural science was divined by the presentiment of somebody, before it was actually verified.

  Ralph Waldo Emerson

  Nature, Science, Men

  Ralph Waldo Emerson (2013). “Delphi Complete Works of Ralph Waldo Emerson (Illustrated)”, p.1491, Delphi Classics

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• As we look out into the Universe and identify the many accidents of physics and astronomy that have worked together to our benefit, it almost seems as if the Universe must in some sense have known that we were coming.

  Freeman Dyson

  Together, Looks, Benefits

  Freeman Dyson (2013). “FROM EROS TO GAIA”, p.166, Pantheon

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• Astronomy says: the sun will rise tomorrow,
  Zoology says: on rainbow-fish and lithe gazelle,
  Psychology says: but first it has to be night, so
  Biology says: the body-clocks are stopped all over town
  and
  History says: here are the blankets, layer on layer, down and down.

  Albert Goldbarth

  Night, Rainbow, Psychology

  Albert Goldbarth (1991). “Heaven and Earth: A Cosmology : Poems”, p.118, University of Georgia Press

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• To set foot on the soil of the asteroids, to lift by hand a rock from the Moon, to observe Mars from a distance of several tens of kilometers, to land on its satellite or even on its surface, what can be more fantastic? From the moment of using rocket devices a new great era will begin in astronomy: the epoch of the more intensive study of the firmament.

  Konstantin Tsiolkovsky

  Distance, Moon, Rocks

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• As soon as somebody demonstrates the art of flying, settlers from our species of man will not be lacking on the Moon and Jupiter. Who would have believed that a huge ocean could be crossed more peacefully and safely than the the narrow expanse of the Adriatic, the Baltic Sea or the English Channel? Given ships or sails adapted to the breezes of heaven, there will be those who will not shrink from even that vast expanse.

  Johannes Kepler

  Art, Ocean, Future

  "Kepler's Conversation with Galileo's Sidereal Messenger". Book by Edward Rosen, p. 39, 1965.

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• If it's a new planet, sign me up. I'm tired of driving around the block, boldly going where hundreds have gone before in orbit around earth-give me a place to go and I'll go.

  Neil deGrasse Tyson

  Block, Tired, Space

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• The phenomena of nature, especially those that fall under the inspection of the astronomer, are to be viewed, not only with the usual attention to facts as they occur, but with the eye of reason and experience.

  William Herschel

  Fall, Eye, Science

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• Philosophy begins where religion ends, just as by analogy chemistry begins where alchemy runs out, and astronomy takes the place of astrology.

  Christopher Hitchens

  Running, Philosophy, Astrology

  "God is not Great". Book by Christopher Hitchens, May 1, 2007.

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• The strongest affection and utmost zeal should, I think, promote the studies concerned with the most beautiful objects, most deserving to be known.

  Nicolaus Copernicus

  Beautiful, Stars, Distance

  "On the revolutions".

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• No one can read the history of astronomy without perceiving that Copernicus, Newton, Laplace, are not new men, or a new kind of men, but that Thales, Anaximenes, Hipparchus, Empodocles, Aristorchus, Pythagorus, Oenipodes, had anticipated them.

  Ralph Waldo Emerson

  Men, History, Perception

  Ralph Waldo Emerson (1982). “Emerson: Selected Essays”, p.350, Penguin

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• Does the evolutionary doctrine clash with religious faith? It does not. It is a blunder to mistake the Holy Scriptures for elementary textbooks of astronomy, geology, biology, and anthropology.

  Theodosius Dobzhansky

  Faith, Religious, Mistake

  "Nothing in Biology Makes Sense Except in the Light of Evolution". "The American Biology Teacher", Volume 35, (pp. 125-129), March 1973.

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