Top 100 Kepler's Quotes
#1. Kepler's second law: A planet sweeps out equal areas in equal times. It takes as long to travel from B to A as from F to E as from D to C; and the shaded areas BSA, FSE and DSC are all equal.
Carl Sagan
#2. in 1620 Kepler's mother was being tried for witchcraft.
James A. Connor
#3. 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
#4. I measured the skies, now the shadows I measure, Sky-bound was the mind, earth-bound the body rests. [Kepler's epitaph]
Johannes Kepler
#5. Just as the eye was made to see colours, and the ear to hear sounds, so the human mind was made to understand, not whatever you please, but quantity.
Johannes Kepler
#6. A most unfailing experience ... of the excitement of sublunary (that is, human) natures by the conjunctions and aspects of the planets has instructed and compelled my unwilling belief.
Johannes Kepler
#7. My greatest desire is that I may perceive the God whom I find everywhere in the external world, in like manner also within and inside myself.
Johannes Kepler
#8. Gravity is a mutual affection between cognate bodies towards union or conjunction (similar in kind to the magnetic virtue), so that the earth attracts a stone much rather than the stone seeks the earth.
Johannes Kepler
#9. Kepler and Newton represent a critical transition in human history, the discovery that fairly simple mathematical laws pervade all of Nature; that the same rules apply on Earth as in the skies; and that there is a resonance between the way we think and the way the world works.
Carl Sagan
#10. I have consummated the work to which I pledged myself, using all the abilities that You (God) gave me; I have shown the glory of Your works to men, but if I have pursued my own glory among men while engaged in a work intended for Your glory, be merciful, be compassionate, and forgive.
Johannes Kepler
#11. If the earth were not round, heavy bodies would not tend from every side in a straight line towards the center of the earth, but to different points from different sides.
Johannes Kepler
#12. If the earth should cease to attract its waters to itself all the waters of the sea would be raised and would flow to the body of the moon.
Johannes Kepler
#13. before the origin of things, geometry was coeternal with the Divine Mind
Johannes Kepler
#14. O telescope, instrument of much knowledge, more precious than any scepter! Is not he who holds thee in his hand made king and lord of the works of God?" - John Kepler.
Garrett P. Serviss
#15. The Earth is round, and is inhabited on all sides, is insignificantly small, and is borne through the stars.
Johannes Kepler
#16. As soon as somebody demonstrates the art of flying, settlers from our species of man will not be lacking on the moon and Jupiter ... 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
#17. These three laws of Kepler give a complete description of the motion of the planets around the sun.
Anonymous
#18. Wherever there are qualities there are likewise quantities, but not always vice versa.
Johannes Kepler
#19. I used to measure the Heavens, now I measure the shadows of Earth. The mind belonged to Heaven, the body's shadow lies here.
Johannes Kepler
#20. If God himself has waited six thousand years for someone to contemplate his works, my book can wait for a hundred.
Johannes Kepler
#21. The radius vector describes equal areas in equal times.
Johannes Kepler
#22. O telescope, instrument of knowledge, more precious than any sceptre.
Johannes Kepler
#23. I believe only and alone in the service of Jesus Christ. In him is all refuge and solace.
Johannes Kepler
#24. Since geometry is co-eternal with the divine mind before the birth of things, God himself served as his own model in creating the world (for what is there in God which is not God?), and he with his own image reached down to humanity.
Johannes Kepler
#25. If two stones were placed ... near each other, and beyond the sphere of influence of a third cognate body, these stones, like two magnetic needles, would come together in the intermediate point, each approaching the other by a space proportional to the comparative mass of the other.
Johannes Kepler
#26. Experimental investigation, to borrow a phrase employed by Kepler respecting the testing of hypotheses, is "a very great thief of time." Sometimes it costs many days to determine a fact that can be stated in a line.
John William Draper
#27. Temporis filia veritas; cui me obstetricari non pudet.
Truth is the daughter of time, and I feel no shame in being her midwife.
Johannes Kepler
#28. For a long time I wanted to become a theologian ... now, however, behold how through my efforts God is being debated in astronomy.
Johannes Kepler
#29. The orbit of every planet is an ellipse with the sun at one of the two foci.
Johannes Kepler
#30. [Newton wrote to Halley ... that he would not give Hooke any credit] That, alas, is vanity. You find it in so many scientists. You know, it has always hurt me to think that Galileo did not acknowledge the work of Kepler.
Albert Einstein
#31. It may be well to wait a century for a reader, as God has waited six thousand years for an observer.
Johannes Kepler
#33. But who shall dwell in these worlds if they be inhabited? ... Are we or they Lords of the World? ... And how are all things made for man?
KEPLER (quoted in The Anatomy of Melancholy)
H.G.Wells
#34. In the four years since its launch, Kepler has chalked up 122 new and confirmed planets. It's also caught the scent of nearly three thousand additional objects, of which probably 80 percent or more will turn out to be other-worldly orbs.
Seth Shostak
#36. God gives every animal the means of saving its life-why object if he gives astrology to the astronomer?
Johannes Kepler
#37. Data from orbiting telescopes like NASA's Kepler Mission hint that the tally of habitable planets in our galaxy is many billion. If E.T.'s not out there, then Earth is more than merely special - it's some sort of miracle.
Seth Shostak
#39. Priusquam autem ad creationem, hoc est ad finem omnis disputationis, veniamus: tentanda omnia existimo.
However, before we come to [special] creation, which puts an end to all discussion: I think we should try everything else.
Johannes Kepler
#40. When Kepler found his long-cherished belief did not agree with the most precise observation, he accepted the uncomfortable fact. He preferred the hard truth to his dearest illusions, that is the heart of science.
Carl Sagan
#41. Repudiating the sensible world, which he neither sees himself nor believes from those who have, the Peripatetic joins combat by childish quibbling in a world on paper, and denies the Sun shines because he himself is blind.
Johannes Kepler
#42. Astronomy would not provide me with bread if men did not entertain hopes of reading the future in the heavens.
Johannes Kepler
#43. What a deep [trust] in the rationality of the structure of the world and what a longing to understand even a small glimpse of the reason revealed in the world there must have been in Kepler and Newton to enable them to unravel the mechanism of the heavens in long years of lonely work!
Albert Einstein
#44. When things are in order, if the cause of the orderliness cannot be deduced from the motion of the elements or from the composition of matter, it is quite possibly a cause possessing a mind.
Johannes Kepler
#45. Once miracles are admitted, every scientific explanation is out of the question.
Johannes Kepler
#46. Discover the force of the skies O Men: once recognised it can be put to use.
Johannes Kepler
#47. Galileo and Kepler had "dangerous thoughts" (as they are called in Japan), and so have the most intelligent men of our own day.
Bertrand Russell
#48. Now, as God the maker play'd he taught the game to Nature whom he created in his image; taught her the selfsame game which he played to her.
Johannes Kepler
#49. The sphere of the attractive virtue which is in the moon extends as far as the earth, and entices up the waters; but as the moon flies rapidly across the zenith, and the waters cannot follow so quickly, a flow of the ocean is occasioned in the torrid zone towards the westward.
Johannes Kepler
#50. I much prefer the sharpest criticism of a single intelligent man to the thoughtless approval of the masses.
Johannes Kepler
#51. So long as the mother, Ignorance, lives, it is not safe for Science the offspring, to divulge the hidden causes of things.
Johannes Kepler
#52. From the time of Kepler to that of Newton, and from Newton to Hartley, not only all things in external nature, but the subtlest mysteries of life and organization, and even of the intellect and moral being, were conjured within the magic circle of mathematical formulae.
Samuel Taylor Coleridge
#53. Geometry is one and eternal shining in the mind of God
Johannes Kepler
#54. The moon ... is a mass, akin to the mass of the earth, attracts the waters by a magnetic force, not because they are liquid, but because they possess earthy substance, and so share in the movements of a heavy body.
Johannes Kepler
#55. The roads by which men arrive at their insights into celestial matters seem to me almost as worthy of wonder as those matters in themselves.
Johannes Kepler
#56. This plucky NASA telescope is able to find planets en masse. If you compare planet hunting to prospecting for gold, then Kepler is equivalent to trading in your trusty pan for a diesel-powered sluice box.
Seth Shostak
#57. [Quantity is the fundamental feature of things,] the 'primarium accidens substantiae,' ... prior to the other categories.
Johannes Kepler
#58. Copernicus, Galileo, and Kepler did not solve an old problem, they asked a new question, and in doing so they changed the whole basis on which the old questions had been framed.
Ken Robinson
#59. Ships and sails proper for the heavenly air should be fashioned. Then there will also be people, who do not shrink from the dreary vastness of space.
Johannes Kepler
#60. If there is anything that can bind the mind of man to this dreary exile of our earthly home and can reconcile us with our fate so that one can enjoy living, - then it is verily the enjoyment of the mathematical sciences and astronomy.
Johannes Kepler
#61. [Kepler] preferred the hard truth to his dearest illusions, and that is the heart of science.
Carl Sagan
#62. Wheresoever the earth may be placed, or whithersoever it may be carried by its animal faculty, heavy bodies will always be carried towards it.
Johannes Kepler
#63. I used to measure the heavens
Now the Earth's shadows I measure
My mind was in the heavens,
Now the shadow of my body rests here
Johannes Kepler
#64. We find, therefore, under this orderly arrangement, a wonderful symmetry in the universe, and a definite relation of harmony in the motion and magnitude of the orbs, of a kind that is not possible to obtain in any other way.
Johannes Kepler
#65. I also ask you my friends not to condemn me entirely to the mill of mathematical calculations, and allow me time for philosophical speculations, my only pleasures.
Johannes Kepler
#66. Johannes Kepler published his book Harmonices Mundi in 1619. In it he proposed that it was the Creator who "decorated" the whole world, using mathematical and musical harmonic proportions. The spiritual and the physical are united.
David Byrne
#67. It is to these two discoveries by Bradley that we owe the exactness of modern astronomy ... This double service assures to their discoverer the most distinguished place (after Hipparchus and Kepler) above the greatest astronomers of all ages and all countries.
Jean-Baptiste Joseph Delambre
#68. And I cherish more than anything else the Analogies, my most trustworthy masters. They know all the secrets of Nature, and they ought to be least neglected in Geometry.
Johannes Kepler
#69. I used to measure the skies, now I measure the shadows of Earth.
Although my mind was sky-bound, the shadow of my body lies here.
[Epitaph he composed for himself a few months before he died]
Johannes Kepler
#70. Science is the process of thinking God's thoughts after Him.
Johannes Kepler
#71. Geometry has two great treasures; one is the Theorem of Pythagoras; the other, the division of a line into extreme and mean ratio. The first we may compare to a measure of gold; the second we may name a precious jewel.
Johannes Kepler
#72. The Creator, the fountain of all wisdom, the approver of perpetual order, the eternal and superessential spring of geometry and harmonics.
Johannes Kepler
#73. The mission of NASA's Kepler telescope is to lift the scales from our eyes and reveal to us just how typical our home world is. Kepler operates by measuring the dimming of stars as planets pass ('transit') in front of them. It has found thousands of previously unknown worlds.
Seth Shostak
#74. We do not ask for what useful purpose the birds do sing, for song is their pleasure since they were created for singing. Similarly, we ought not to ask why the human mind troubles to fathom the secrets of the heavens ...
Johannes Kepler
#76. Kepler reportedly said, amid the massacres of religious wars, the laws of elliptical motion belong to no man or principality.'17 The same could be said of music.
John Eliot Gardiner
#78. Thus God himself was too kind to remain idle and began to play the game of signatures signing his likeness unto the world: therefore I chance to think that all nature and the graceful sky are symbolized in the art of Geometria.
Johannes Kepler
#79. The soul of the newly born baby is marked for life by the pattern of the stars at the moment it comes into the world, unconsciously remembers it, and remains sensitive to the return of configurations of a similar kind.
Johannes Kepler
#80. Since we astronomers are priests of the highest God in regard to the book of nature, it befits us to be thoughtful, not of the glory of our minds, but rather, above all else, of the glory of God.
Johannes Kepler
#82. We ought not to ask why the human mind troubles to fathom the secrets of the universe. The diversity of the phenomena of nature is so great, and the treasures hidden in the skies so rich, precisely in order that the human mind shall never be lacking in fresh nourishment.
Johannes Kepler
#83. Do we ask what profit the little bird hopes for in singing?
Johannes Kepler
#84. I am a Lutheran astrologer, I throw away the nonsense and keep the hard kernel.
Johannes Kepler
#85. Among the great men who have philosophized about [the action of the tides], the one who surprised me most is Kepler. He was a person of independent genius, [but he] became interested in the action of the moon on the water, and in other occult phenomena, and similar childishness.
Galileo Galilei
#86. Geometry existed before the creation. It is co-eternal with the mind of God ... Geometry provided God with a model for the Creation ...
Johannes Kepler
#87. When ships to sail the void between the stars have been built, there will step forth men to sail these ships.
Johannes Kepler
#88. The squares of the periodic times are to each other as the cubes of the mean distances.
Johannes Kepler
#89. It may be said that the conceptions of differential quotient and
integral, which in their origin certainly go back to Archimedes,
were introduced into science by the investigations of Kepler,
Descartes, Cavalieri, Fermat and Wallis ...
Sophus Lie
#90. 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
#92. O God, I'm merely thinking you're thoughts after you.
Johann Kepler
#93. Today is just the beginning of Kepler. Because of its super energy-efficient architecture, we will extend GPUs into datacenters, to super thin notebooks, to superphones.
Jen-Hsun Huang
#94. I had the intention of becoming a theologian ... but now I see how God is, by my endeavors, also glorified in astronomy, for 'the heavens declare the glory of God.'
Johannes Kepler
#95. A mind is accustomed to mathematical deduction, when confronted with the faulty foundations of astrology, resists a long, long time, like an obstinate mule, until compelled by beating and curses to put its foot into that dirty puddle.
Johannes Kepler
#97. The heavens declare the glory of Kepler and Newton.
Auguste Comte
#98. Every corporeal substance, so far forth as it is corporeal, has a natural fitness for resting in every place where it may be situated by itself beyond the sphere of influence of a body cognate with it.
Johannes Kepler
#99. In theology we must consider the predominance of authority; in philosophy the predominance of reason.
Johannes Kepler
#100. [God] is the kind Creator who brought forth nature out of nothing.
Johannes Kepler
