Top 71 Quotes About Astronomers
#1. Surely, we are provided with senses as well fitted to penetrate the spaces of the real, the substantial, the eternal, as these outward are to penetrate the material universe. Veias, Menu, Zoroaster, Socrates, Christ, Shakespeare, Swedenborg,
these are some of our astronomers.
Henry David Thoreau
#3. A few minutes after he arrived, Lee was talking to a group of astronomers eager to learn what news he could bring them, for there are few natural philosophers as frustrated as astronomers in a fog.
Philip Pullman
#4. Astronomers, like burglars and jazz musicians, operate best at night.
Miles Kington
#5. 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
#6. Recent results from astronomers who study the occasional gravitational lensing of unknown worlds by intervening stars suggest that orphan planets could be at least as numerous as the stars. In other words, there could be hundreds of billions of orphan worlds shuffling through our galaxy.
Seth Shostak
#7. Astronomers have discovered a planet that is twice the size of earth and made of diamonds. President Obama says the planet may be inhabited by aliens not paying their fair share.
Jay Leno
#8. In the shape of innumerable stars. Thus was formed the Nebulae, of which astronomers have reckoned up nearly 5,000. Among these 5,000 nebulae there is one which has received the name of the Milky Way, and which contains eighteen
Jules Verne
#9. The important concept of the solar wind is that Space is not empty. It is an energy and particle filled environment that interacts with whatever is in it! Astronomers call this 'Dark Energy'.
Steven Magee
#10. OBSERVATORY, n. A place where astronomers conjecture away the guesses of their predecessors.
Ambrose Bierce
#11. Thanks to the discoveries of astronomers in the twentieth century, we now know that the heat death is a myth. The heat death can never happen, and there is no paradox.
Freeman Dyson
#12. I sometimes think that the universe is a machine designed for the perpetual astonishment of astronomers.
Arthur C. Clarke
#13. Perinthia's astronomers are faced with a difficult choice. Either they must admit that all their calculations are wrong and their figures are unable to describe the heavens, or else they must reveal that the order of the gods is reflected exactly in the city of monsters.
Italo Calvino
#14. Wherefore in all great works are Clerks so much desired? Wherefore are Auditors so well-fed? What causeth Geometricians so highly to be enhaunsed? Why are Astronomers so greatly advanced? Because that by number such things they find, which else would farre excell mans minde.
Robert Recorde
#15. ASTRONOMERS TO CONGRESS: WE'RE NOT ALONE
Anonymous
#16. Astronomers have been bewildered by the theory of an expanding universe, but there is no less expansion in the moral infinite of the universe of man. As far as the frontiers of science are pushed back, over the extended arc of these frontiers one will hear the poet's hounds on the chase.
Saint-John Perse
#17. Smiling, he said, Did you know that astronomers call them interplanetary dust?
Jenny Han
#18. Astronomers still can't decide what the shape of our universe is. Is it closed and finite, which is to say, is there a countable tally of all the galaxies that exist, even beyond the ones we can see? Or is it infinite? The latter possibility is still on the table.
Seth Shostak
#19. Physicists and astronomers see their own implications in the world being round, but to me it means that only one-third of the world is asleep at any given time and the other two-thirds is up to something.
Dean Rusk
#20. UFO (Unidentified Flying Object)sightings are not higher among amateur astronomers than they are in the general public. In fact, they're lower. You say, why is that so? Well, because we know what the hell we're looking at!
Neil DeGrasse Tyson
#21. Astronomers at the University of Bullshitshire have just found new evidence that, yes, teenagers really are the center of the universe.'
David Mitchell
#22. Probably the closest things to perfection are the huge absolutely empty holes that astronomers have recently discovered in space. If there's nothing there, how can anything go wrong?
Richard Brautigan
#23. Few sights in science are sadder than astronomers standing in the rain.
Dennis Overbye
#24. John Kerry and Ralph Nader met face-to-face, it was a historic meeting. Astronomers said today their meeting actually created what is called a 'charisma black hole.'
Jay Leno
#25. Astronomers have built telescopes which can show myriads of stars unseen before; but when a man looks through a tear in his own eye, that is a lens which opens reaches into the unknown, and reveals orbs which no telescope, however skilfully constructed, could do.
Henry Ward Beecher
#26. While astronomers have been exploring outer Space, I have been exploring inner space.
Steven Magee
#27. You know, there was a time, just before I started to study physical science, when astronomers thought that systems such as we have here in the solar system required a rare triple collision of stars.
Murray Gell-Mann
#28. 'First Light' is nonfiction, a true story about astronomers who are looking for light coming from the edge of the universe. It tells how science is really done - and science is a lot weirder and more human than most people realize.
Richard Preston
#29. I suspect that both astronomers were, yet again, bending over backwards to be polite: theologians have nothing worthwhile to say about anything else; let's throw them a sop and let them worry away at a couple of questions that nobody can answer and maybe never will.
Richard Dawkins
#30. The scent of frying astronomers long ago ceased to ascend to Yahweh.
H.L. Mencken
#31. I only hope that we shall not wait to adopt the program until after our astronomers have reported a new and unsuspected asteroid moving across their fields of vision with menacing speed. At that point it will be too late!
Wernher Von Braun
#32. Female physicists, astronomers and mathematicians are up against more than 2,000 years of convention that has long portrayed these fields as inherently male.
Margaret Wertheim
#33. Naming celestial objects is usually done by astronomers and professionals. Other people who are interested in space never get the opportunity to do that kind of thing.
Alan Stern
#34. It is unworthy of excellent men to lose hours like slaves in the labour of calculation which could safely be relegated to anyone else if machines were used.
(Describing, in 1685, the value to astronomers of the hand-cranked calculating machine he had invented in 1673.)
Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz
#35. 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
#36. Majority of people find that nature is anything that walks and grows on planet Earth, astronomers have found that this nature stretches way beyond our atmosphere as far as we can see in to the Universe.
Michel Reitsma
#37. Given the tendency of many to picture God's realm as somewhere high above Earth - an idea that sounds suspiciously like the Greek stories of deities perched on inaccessible mountain tops - it may seem plausible to assume that astronomers have special insight. Well, of course they don't.
Seth Shostak
#38. The astronomers tell us that other planets are gifted with two - four - even nine lavish moons. Imagine the romantic possibilities of nine moons.
Edna Ferber
#39. A cosmic mystery of immense proportions, once seemingly on the verge of solution, has deepened and left astronomers and astrophysicists more baffled than ever. The crux ... is that the vast majority of the mass of the universe seems to be missing.
William Broad
#40. Men as steadfast and normal as the women were mercurial and strange. The men in their lives loved them the way astronomers loved stars, loved the promise of what they were, knowing there was something about them they would never truly understand.
Sarah Addison Allen
#41. An astronomer must be cosmopolitan, because ignorant statesmen cannot be expected to value their services
Tycho Brahe
#42. [Gauss calculated the elements of the planet Ceres] and his analysis proved him to be the first of theoretical astronomers no less than the greatest of 'arithmeticians.'
W. W. Rouse Ball
#43. Astronomers ought to be able to ask fundamental questions without accelerators.
Saul Perlmutter
#44. The Apollo pictures of the whole Earth conveyed to multitudes something well known to astronomers: On the scale of the worlds - to say nothing of stars or galaxies - humans are inconsequential, a thin film of life on an obscure and solitary lump of rock and metal
Carl Sagan
#45. What is the ultimate solution to the origin of the Universe? The answers provided by the astronomers are disconcerting and remarkable. Most remarkable of all is the fact that in science, as in the Bible, the world begins with an act of creation.
Robert Jastrow
#46. For what it's worth, in my experience astronomers are more likely than biologists to be believers. But several surveys, more scientific than my anecdotal experiences, have confirmed that in academic settings, the real atheists are to be found in English Literature departments.
Guy Consolmagno
#47. The scorn which I had reason to fear on account of the novelty and unconventionality of my opinion almost induced me to abandon completely the work which I had undertaken ... Astronomy is written for astronomers. To them my work too will seem, unless I am mistaken, to make some contribution.
Nicolaus Copernicus
#48. The big discoveries raise questions that make astronomers work feverishly and argue with an agitation that verges on rudeness.
Nigel Calder
#49. Astronomers are obsessed with building larger and larger telescopes. There are two promises that we make with bigger telescopes: that they can see fainter things and that they see more detail. But it's been really hard to follow through on that second promise because of atmospheric distortion.
Andrea M. Ghez
#50. The Scriptures were written, not to make us astronomers, but to make us saints.
Matthew Henry
#51. As a confirmed astronomer
I'm always for a better sky.
Robert Frost
#52. It must have appeared almost as improbable to the earlier geologists, that the laws of earthquakes should one day throw light on the origin of mountains, as it must to the first astronomers, that the fall of an apple should assist in explaining the motions of the moon.
Charles Lyell
#53. Students of the heavens are separable into astronomers and astrologers as readily as are the minor domestic ruminants into sheep and goats, but the separation of philosophers into sages and cranks seems to be more sensitive to frames of reference.
Willard Van Orman Quine
#54. 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
#55. Nancy
According to astronomers, every atom in my body was forged in a star. I am made, they insist, of stardust. I am stardust braided into strands and streamers of information, proteins and DNA, double helixes of stardust. In every cell of my body there is a thread of stardust as long as my arm.
Chet Raymo
#56. Back in 1917, when Einstein had analyzed the "cosmological considerations" arising from his general theory of relativity, most astronomers thought that the universe consisted only of our Milky Way, floating with its 100 billion or so stars in a void of empty space.
Walter Isaacson
#57. The atmosphere is great for people - it allows us to survive - but it's a real headache for astronomers.
Andrea M. Ghez
#59. The Astronomer's Drinking Song
Astronomers! What can avail
Those who calumniate us;
Experiment can never fail
With such an apparatus ...
Augustus De Morgan
#60. Astronomers are greatly disappointed when, having traveled halfway around the world to see an eclipse, clouds prevent a sight of it; and yet a sense of relief accompanies the disappointment.
Simon Newcomb
#62. Unlike what you may be told in other sectors of life, when observing the universe, size does matter, which often leads to polite 'telescope envy' at gatherings of amateur astronomers.
Neil DeGrasse Tyson
#63. Of course, Sol is a big ball of hot gas, but one that - thanks to its endlessly boiling innards - shakes and vibrates. By studying patterns on the Sun's surface, astronomers can learn much about Sol's internal construction.
Seth Shostak
#64. We became astronomers thinking we were studying the universe, and now we learn that we are just studying the 5 or 10 percent that is luminous.
Vera Rubin
#65. An estimated hundred billion star systems make up the Milky Way galaxy, and astronomers believe that all are orbited by an average of at least one planet.
Edward O. Wilson
#66. Give consideration to the fact that alien astronomers could have scrutinized Earth for more than 4 billion years without detecting any radio signals, despite the fact that our world is the poster child for habitability.
Seth Shostak
#67. Interestingly, according to modern astronomers, space is finite. This is a very comforting thought-particularly for people who can never remember where they have left things.
Woody Allen
#68. Astronomers say the universe is finite, which is a comforting thought for those people who can't remember where they leave things.
Woody Allen
#69. Astronomers sometimes observe that a star of medium magnitude increases suddenly in size; a star invisible to the naked eye may become very brilliant and visible without any telescope - the appearance of a Nova.
Frederic Joliot-Curie
#70. Astronomers are spherical bastards. No matter how you look at them they are just bastards.
Fritz Zwicky
#71. 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