Copernicus Quotes

• It is in the name of Moses that Bellarmin thunderstrikes Galileo; and this great vulgarizer of the great seeker Copernicus, Galileo, the old man of truth, the magian of the heavens, was reduced to repeating on his knees word for word after the inquisitor this formula of shame: "Corde sincera et fide non ficta abjuro maledico et detestor supradictos errores et hereses." Falsehood put an ass's hood on science.

  Victor Hugo

  Science, Men, Names

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• History of science is a relay race, my painter friend. Copernicus took over his flag from Aristarchus, from Cicero, from Plutarch; and Galileo took that flag over from Copernicus.

  Mehmet Murat Ildan

  Race, Flags, Painter

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• Since Copernicus, man seems to have got himself on an inclined plane-now he is slipping faster and faster away from the center into-what? into nothingness? into a 'penetrating sense of his nothingness?' ... all science, natural as well as unnatural-which is what I call the self-critique of knowledge-has at present the object of dissuading man from his former respect for himself, as if this had been but a piece of bizarre conceit.

  Friedrich Nietzsche

  Science, Men, Self

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• People give ear to an upstart astrologer [Copernicus]...this fool wishes
  to reverse the entire science of astronomy

  Martin Luther

  People, Giving, Wish

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• The full impact of the Lobachevskian method of challenging axioms has probably yet to be felt. It is no exaggeration to call Lobachevsky the Copernicus of Geometry [as did Clifford], for geometry is only a part of the vaster domain which he renovated; it might even be just to designate him as a Copernicus of all thought.

  Eric Temple Bell

  Science, Impact, Challenges

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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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• Modern neurosis began with the discoveries of Copernicus. Science made men feel small by showing him that the earth was not the center of the universe.

  Mary McCarthy

  Science, Men, Discovery

  Mary McCarthy (1964). “The Humanist in the Bathtub”

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• Yet in this my stars were not Mercury as morning star in the angle of the seventh house, in quartile with Mars, but they were Copernicus, they were Tycho Brahe, without whose books of observations everything which has now been brought by me into the brightest daylight would lie buried in darkness.

  Johannes Kepler

  Morning, Stars, Lying

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• Who will venture to place the authority of Copernicus above that of the Holy Spirit?

  John Calvin

  Scary, Venture, Spirit

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• It was not just the Church that resisted the heliocentrism of Copernicus.

  Tycho Brahe

  Church

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• [Copernicus] did not ignore the Bible, but he knew very well that if his doctrine were proved, then it could not contradict the Scriptures when they were rightly understood.

  Galileo Galilei

  Doctrine, Scripture, Wells

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• The world is kept alive only by heretics: the heretic Christ, the heretic Copernicus, the heretic Tolstoy. Our symbol of faith is heresy...

  Yevgeny Zamyatin

  Alive, World, Tomorrow

  "Tomorrow" by Yevgeny Zamyatin, translated by Mirra Ginsburg in "A Soviet Heretic : Essays by Yevgeny Zamyatin" (1970), 1919.

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• Is it so bad, then, to be misunderstood? Pythagoras was misunderstood, and Socrates, and Jesus, and Luther, and Copernicus, and Galileo, and Newton, and every pure and wise spirit that ever took flesh. To be great is to be misunderstood.

  Ralph Waldo Emerson

  Life, Wise, Wisdom

  Essays "Self-Reliance" (1841)

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• We have to start at ground zero and ask what it means to have a real connection with God and what it means to pray. We have to recast our whole understanding of God. We live on the other side of Copernicus, Kepler, Galileo, Isaac Newton, Charles Darwin, Sigmund Freud, Albert Einstein, Steven Hawking, a whole group of people who have recast the way we think about reality.

  John Shelby Spong

  Zero, Real, Mean

  Source: mormon-chronicles.blogspot.com

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• I live on the other side of Copernicus and Galileo; I can no longer conceive of God as sort of above the sky, looking down and keeping record books.

  John Shelby Spong

  Book, Sky, Records

  "Bishop Shelby Spong". "Sunday Nights" with John Cleary, www.abc.net.au. June 17, 2001.

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• Matter is real to my senses, but they aren't trustworthy. If Galileo or Copernicus had accepted what they saw, they would never have discovered the movement of the earth and planets.

  Albert Einstein

  Real, Movement, Earth

  William Hermanns, Albert Einstein (1983). “Einstein and the Poet: In Search of the Cosmic Man”, Branden Publishing Company

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• This excerpt is presented as reproduced by Copernicus in the preface to De Revolutionibus: "Some think that the earth remains at rest. But Philolaus the Pythagorean believes that, like the sun and moon, it revolves around the fire in an oblique circle. Heraclides of Pontus and Ecphantus the Pythagorean make the earth move, not in a progressive motion, but like a wheel in rotation from west to east around its own center."

  Plutarch

  Believe, Moving, Moon

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• In the index to the six hundred odd pages of Arnold Toynbee's A Study of History, abridged version, the names of Copernicus, Galileo, Descartes and Newton do not occur yet their cosmic quest destroyed the medieval vision of an immutable social order in a walled-in universe and transformed the European landscape, society, culture, habits and general outlook, as thoroughly as if a new species had arisen on this planet.

  Arthur Koestler

  Order, Names, Historical

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• Some also deny that the earth is in the middest of the world, and some affirme that it is mouable, as also Copernicus by way of supposition, and not for that he thought so in deede: who affirmeth that the earth turneth about, and that the sunne standeth still in the midst of the heauens, by help of which false supposition he hath made truer demonstrations of the motions and reuolutions of the celestiall Spheares, than euer were made before. . . .

  Thomas Blundeville

  World, Earth, Way

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• The following passage is one of those cited by Copernicus himself in his preface to De Revolutionibus: "The Syracusan Hicetas, as Theophrastus asserts, holds the view that the heaven, sun, moon, stars, and in short all of the things on high are stationary, and that nothing in the world is in motion except the earth, which by revolving and twisting round its axis with extreme velocity produces all the same results as would be produced if the earth were stationary and the heaven in motion. . . ."

  Marcus Tullius Cicero

  Stars, Moon, Axes

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• I am a Christian which means that I believe in the deity of Christ, like Tycho de Brahe, Copernicus, Descartes, Newton, Leibnitz, Pascal… like all great astronomers mathematicians of the past.

  Augustin-Louis Cauchy

  Christian, Believe, Mean

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• There are men whose sense of humour is so ill developed that they still bear a grudge against Copernicus because he dethroned them from the central position in the universe. They feel it a personal affront that they can no longer consider themselves the pivot upon which turns the whole of created things.

  W. Somerset Maugham

  Men, Bears, Grudge

  "A Writer's Notebook (1901)". Book by W. Somerset Maugham, 1946.

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• What Copernicus really achieved was not the discovery of a true theory but of a fertile new point of view.

  Ludwig Wittgenstein

  Discovery, Views, Theory

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• It would be as unthinkable to try to construct the Labour Party without Marx as it would to be to establish university faculties of astronomy,anthropology or psychology without permitting the study of Copernicus, Darwin or Freud, and still expect such faculties to be taken seriously

  Tony Benn

  Party, Taken, Psychology

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• Louis Kelso's formula sounds like Lydia Pinkham's Vegetable Compound. The whole theory sounds crazy. But, then, one may recall, they said all that of Copernicus too.

  James J. Kilpatrick

  Wisdom, Crazy, Vegetables

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