Telescopes Quotes - Page 7

• As the telescope is not a substitute for, but an aid to, our sight, so revelation is not designed to supersede the use of reason, but to supply its deficiencies.

  Richard Whately

  Bible, Sight, Use

  Richard Whately (1856). “Thoughts and Apophthegms: From the Writings of Archbishop Whateley”, p.49

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• I have tried to improve telescopes and practiced continually to see with them. These instruments have play'd me so many tricks that I have at last found them out in many of their humours.

  William Herschel

  Play, Lasts, Found

  "The Herschel Chronicle: the Life-story of William Herschel and his Sister". Book by Constance Anne Lubbock, Caroline Herschel, 102, 1933.

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• I'm such a long-term investor, I've never really let go and celebrated what I did with the Hubble telescope.

  Story Musgrave

  Letting Go, Long, Hubble Space Telescope

  "NASA Distinguished Service Medal". The Academy of Achievement Interview, www.achievement.org. May 22, 1997.

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• ...the mind is more powerful than any imaginable particle accelerator, more sensitive than any radio receiver or the largest optical telescope, more complete in its grasp of information than any computer: the human body- its organs, its voice, its powers of locomotion, and its imagination- is a more-than-sufficient means for the exploration of any place, time or energy level in the universe.

  Terence McKenna

  Powerful, Mean, Voice

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• But they had, perversely, been living among people who were peering into the wrong end of the telescope, or something, and who had convinced themselves that the opposite was true - that the world had once been a splendid, orderly place...and that everything had been slowly, relentlessly falling apart ever since.

  Neal Stephenson

  Fall, Opposites, People

  "Quicksilver". Book by Neal Stephenson, September 23, 2003.

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• Some things mankind can finish and be done with, but not ... science, that persists, and changes from ancient Chaldeans studying the stars to a new telescope with a 200-inch reflector and beyond; not religion, that persists, and changes from old credulities and world views to new thoughts of God and larger apprehensions of his meaning.

  Harry Emerson Fosdick

  Change, God, Stars

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• One hardly knows where, in the history of science, to look for an important movement that had its effective start in so pure and simple an accident as that which led to the building of the great Washington telescope, and went on to the discovery of the satellites of Mars.

  Simon Newcomb

  Knowledge, Science, Simple

  Simon Newcomb (1903). “The reminiscences of an astronomer”, Harper and Brothers

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• I therefore concluded, and decided unhesitatingly, that there are three stars in the heavens moving about Jupiter, as Venus and Mercury about the Sun; which at length was established as clear as daylight by numerous other observations.

  Galileo Galilei

  Stars, Moving, Science

  "The English Renaissance: An Anthology of Sources and Document". Book by Kate Aughterson (p. 383), June 1, 2002.

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• What does it mean for a civilisation to be a million years old? We have had radio telescopes and spaceships for a few decades; our technical civilisation is a few hundred years old ... an advanced civilisation millions of years old is as much beyond us as we are beyond a bushbaby or a macaque

  Carl Sagan

  Mean, Technology, Years

  Carl Sagan (2011). “Cosmos”, p.337, Ballantine Books

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• I read not so long ago about the construction of a large telescope in Chile's Atacama Desert, where rainfall can average a millimetre a year and the air is fifty times as dry as the air in Death Valley. Needless to say, skies over the Atacama are pristine. The pilgrim astronomer ventures to the earth's ravaged reaches in order to peer more keenly at other worlds, and I suppose the novelist is up to something similar.

  Brad Leithauser

  Air, Average, Long Ago

  "Reading Your Friends’ Novels" by Brad Leithauser, www.newyorker.com. January 07, 2013.

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• The Bible is like a telescope. If a man looks through his telescope, then he sees worlds beyond; but if he looks at his telescope, then he does not see anything but that. The Bible is a thing to be looked through, to see that which is beyond; but most people only look at it; and so they see only the dead letter.

  Phillips Brooks

  Spiritual, Men, People

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• At one point consciousness-altering devices like the microscope and telescope were criminalized for exactly the same reasons that psychedelic plants were banned in later years. They allow us to peer into bits and zones of Chaos.

  Timothy Leary

  Years, Vision, Peers

  Timothy Leary (1994). “Das GeneRationen-Spiel & wie die HeimMedien die kulturelle Evolution designen”

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• I never really understood that massive collaboration involving hundreds of people is what makes movies possible, and it's also why I would agree that curiosity is not the most important human trait; the urge to collaborate is. Heck . . . only we have the ability to cooperate to make like online communities and space telescopes and imaginariums and movies. So the great thrill of this whole experience [my novel being made into a movie] for me was . .. .seeing humanity do what it's best at, which ultimately is not competing but cooperating.

  John Green

  Teamwork, Space, People

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• If there is no solace in the fruits of our research, there is at least some consolation in the research itself. Men and women are not content to comfort themselves with tales of gods and giants, or to confine their thoughts to the daily affairs of life; they also build telescopes and satellites and accelerators and sit at their desks for endless hours working out the meaning of the data they gather.

  Steven Weinberg

  Hard Work, Science, Men

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• Countless women are alive today because of ideas stimulated by a design flaw in the Hubble Space Telescope.

  Neil deGrasse Tyson

  Bad Ass, Ideas, Space

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• We know there are billions of stars and planets literally out there, and the universe is getting bigger. We know from our fancy telescopes that just in the last two years more than 20 planets have been identified outside our solar system that seem to be far enough away from their suns - - and dense enough - - that they might be able to support some form of life. So it makes it increasing less likely that we're alone. But if we were visited someday, I wouldn't be surprised.

  William J. Clinton

  Inspirational, Motivational, Suicide

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• Students using astrophysical textbooks remain essentially ignorant of even the existence of plasma concepts, despite the fact that some of them have been known for half a century. The conclusion is that astrophysics is too important to be left in the hands of astrophysicists who have gotten their main knowledge from these textbooks. Earthbound and space telescope data must be treated by scientists who are familiar with laboratory and magnetospheric physics and circuit theory, and of course with modern plasma theory.

  Hannes Alfven

  Knowledge, Science, Hands

  "Hannes Alfvén: Dean of the Plasma Dissidents". Book by Anthony L. Peratt, p. 197, 1998.

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• 'As a fraction of your tax dollar today, what is the total cost of all spaceborne telescopes, planetary probes, the rovers on Mars, the International Space Station, the space shuttle, telescopes yet to orbit, and missions yet to fly?' Answer: one-half of one percent of each tax dollar. Half a penny. I'd prefer it were more: perhaps two cents on the dollar. Even during the storied Apollo era, peak NASA spending amounted to little more than four cents on the tax dollar.

  Neil deGrasse Tyson

  Bad Ass, Two, Space

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• Astronomy may be revolutionized more than any other field of science by observations from above the atmosphere. Study of the planets, the Sun, the stars, and the rarified matter in space should all be profoundly influenced by measurements from balloons, rockets, probes and satellites. ... In a new adventure of discovery no one can foretell what will be found, and it is probably safe to predict that the most important new discovery that will be made with flying telescopes will be quite unexpected and unforeseen.

  Lyman Spitzer

  Stars, Adventure, Science

  Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, Vol. 17, No. 5, p. 191, 194, May 1961.

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• Affection, like melancholy, magnifies trifles; but the magnifying of the one is like looking through a telescope at heavenly objects; that of the other, like enlarging monsters with a microscope.

  Leigh Hunt

  Love, Monsters, Affection

  Leigh Hunt, Thornton Leigh Hunt (1862). “The Correspondence of Leigh Hunt”, p.31, London : Smith, Elder

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• One function of the income gap is that the people at the top of the heap have a hard time even seeing those at the bottom. They practically need a telescope. The pharaohs of ancient Egypt probably didn't was a lot of time thinking about the people who build their pyramids, either.

  Molly Ivins

  Hard Times, Thinking, Egypt

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• An atheist is a man who looks through a telescope and tries to explain what he can't see.

  Orlando Aloysius Battista

  Atheist, Men, Atheism

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• In this way, Edwin Hubble worked out the distances to nine different galaxies. We now know that our galaxy is only one of some hundred thousand million that can be seen using modern telescopes, each galaxy itself containing some hundred thousand million stars.

  Stephen Hawking

  Stars, Distance, Different

  Stephen Hawking (2009). “A Brief History Of Time: From Big Bang To Black Holes”, p.38, Random House

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• Of all man’s instruments, the most wondrous, no doubt, is the book. The other instruments are extensions of his body. The microscope, the telescope, are extensions of his sight; the telephone is the extension of his voice; then we have the plow and the sword, extensions of the arm. But the book is something else altogether: the book is an extension of memory and imagination.

  Jorge Luis Borges

  Memories, Book, Men

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• The mighty steam-engine has its germ in the simple boiler in which the peasant prepares his food. The huge ship is but the expansion of the floating leaf freighted with its cargo of atmospheric dust; and the flying balloon is but the infant's soap-bubble lightly laden and overgrown. But the Telescope, even in its most elementary form, embodies a novel and gigantic idea, without an analogue in nature, and without a prototype in experience

  John Timbs

  Nature, Science, Simple

  John Timbs (2012). “Stories of Inventors and Discoverers in Science and the Useful Arts”, p.212, BoD – Books on Demand

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