Top 100 Quotes About Astronomy
#1. It's amazing to me that we humans have the intellectual capacity to ask deep questions and to devise methods for learning how the universe works and how its contents evolve with time.
Alex Filippenko
#2. Did you know that the center of a Protostar (the star in the middle of a nebula) is called a Nuclear Furnace? So you can call that the star's "heart." The heart of a star is a furnace. Not much unlike the human heart.
C. JoyBell C.
#3. I almost got a psychology degree, I almost got a philosophy degree. I kept changing it so they couldn't make me graduate. I studied anthropology and eastern religion, epistomology, and astronomy ... I took every interesting course I could find for nine years.
Patrick Rothfuss
#4. Who will venture to place the authority of Copernicus above that of the Holy Spirit?
[Lutheran theologian Abraham Calovius illustrating his objection to heliocentrism due to the Bible's support of geocentrism]
Abraham Calovius
#5. I was never strong at maths, but I eventually got onto a university physics/astronomy course, and that led on to my Ph.D. and eventual employment.
Alastair Reynolds
#6. When we look up at night and view the stars, everything we see is shinning because of distant nuclear fusion.
Carl Sagan
#7. Religionists are clinging to little, positive, verbal, formal versions of the moral law ... while the laws of the Law, the great circling truths whose only adequate symbol is the material laws, the astronomy etc. are all unobserved, and sneered at when spoken of.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
#8. It seems impossible that you could get something from nothing, but the fact that once there was nothing and now there is a universe is evident proof that you can.
Bill Bryson
#9. We are made of star material, and every atom of matter on Earth originated in the core of a star.
Margaret Robertson
#10. Astrology is an aesthetic affront. It cheapens astronomy, like using Beethoven for commercial jingles.
Richard Dawkins
#11. Mauna Kea is a known biologically hostile work environment and one can only wonder why the
astronomy community is investing 1.4 billion dollars to build the world's largest telescope there.
Steven Magee
#12. Wisdom tolerates blustered opinions, the better to dismiss them later with discovery.
John Pipkin
#13. The natural pattern of current astronomy is provided by the cryptic unity of nature itself (belief in which is the chief act of faith of the scientist).
Nigel Calder
#14. I thought this couldn't happen in astronomy. Isn't celestial mechanics supposed to be an exact science? So we poor backward biologists were always being told.
Arthur C. Clarke
#15. I was born on January 8, 1942, exactly three hundred years after the death of Galileo. I estimate, however, that about two hundred thousand other babies were also born that day. I don't know whether any of them was later interested in astronomy.
Stephen Hawking
#16. From the moment of using rocket devices, a great new era will begin in astronomy: the epoch of the more intensive study of the firmament.
Konstantin Tsiolkovsky
#17. People say- 'NASA lies.' I say- 'the moon knows it all. Look at the moon and forget the spinning flat world.
Munia Khan
#18. The body is a device to calculate
the astronomy of the spirit.
Look through that astrolabe
and become oceanic.
Rumi
#19. The great radio telescopes of the world are constructed in remote locations for the same reason Paul Gauguin sailed to Tahiti: For them to work well they must be far from civilization.
Carl Sagan
#20. Here the sky is wrapped in silk. The breathings of so many men and animals, and the smoke of your coal, and the fog, oh, it is too much. The Paris sky is perfect. A man must see clearly, to see something new.
John Pipkin
#21. He left the room, and closeted himself in the dark, buzzing space where he raised his wasps and plotted the courses of heavenly bodies.
Kim Newman
#23. Why don't they make more science fiction movies? The answer to any question starting, Why don't they- is almost always, Money.
Robert A. Heinlein
#24. 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
#25. Of all the sciences, astronomy was the one the superstitious liked least.
Ken MacLeod
#26. Science Fiction is not just about the future of space ships travelling to other planets, it is fiction based on science and I am using science as my basis for my fiction, but it's the science of prehistory - palaeontology and archaeology - rather than astronomy or physics.
Jean M. Auel
#27. Io, Europa, Ganimedes puer, atque Calisto
lascivo nimium perplacuere Iovi.
(Io, Europa, the boy Ganymede, and Callisto greatly pleased lustful Jupiter.)
[Marius naming Jupiter's moons]
Simon Marius
#28. Some people think emotionally more often than they think politically. Some think politically more often than they think rationally. Others never think rationally about anything at all.
No judgment implied. Just an observation.
Neil DeGrasse Tyson
#30. in astronomy class, the muse urania angrily watches a panel of men talk about the wonders of the stars as though they created them.
Salma Deera
#31. The Mars Polar Lander has been quieter than George W. Bush after a foreign policy question.
David Letterman
#32. My interest in astronomy grew from the play 'Space' that I did, where I had to learn where my character was from. I had to study the stars and figure where everything was and how I got here and all of those things.
J. August Richards
#33. I didn't understand how you could be an actor if you didn't also study philosophy and study political science, astronomy. And also just go out and live life and have experiences.
Brit Marling
#34. I can see the use and value of religion, just as I can see the use of mud wrestling, yoga, astronomy and sadomasochism. but I reject the idea that you can't be a deep human being without it or any of them.
Brian Eno
#35. truths are easy to understand once they are discovered; the point is to discover them.' " "More Oscar Wilde?" "Galileo, the father of modern astronomy. Another
Kami Garcia
#36. I do not remember exactly when I became interested in astronomy, but I know it was at a very young age. I did organize an astronomy club for my friends at the age of 11. We would meet once a week to learn about the constellations.
Nancy Roman
#37. The Big Dipper wheels on its bowl. In years hence it will have stopped looking like a saucepan and will resemble a sugar scoop as the earth continues to wobble and the dipper's seven stars speed in different directions.
Ann Zwinger
#38. I turned my attention for a while to gamma ray astronomy and soon began the first in a continous series of experiments at the Savannah River site to study the properties of the neutrino.
Frederick Reines
#39. Astronomy, that micography of heaven, is the most magnificent of the sciences ... Astronomy has its clear side and its luminous side; on its clear side it is tinctured with algebra, on its luminous side with poetry.
Victor Hugo
#40. 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
#42. Astronomy is perhaps the science whose discoveries owe least to chance, in which human understanding appears in its whole magnitude, and through which man can best learn how small he is.
Georg C. Lichtenberg
#43. My only wish would be to have 10 more lives to live on this planet. If that were possible, I'd spend one lifetime each in embryology, genetics, physics, astronomy and geology. The other lifetimes would be as a pianist, backwoodsman, tennis player, or writer for the 'National Geographic.'
Joseph Murray
#44. The narrow sectarian cannot read astronomy with impunity. The creeds of his church shrivel like dried leaves at the door of the observatory.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
#45. I'm interested in astrology and astronomy.
Emm Gryner
#46. The quiet brings to mind the multitude of men and women living out their days in solitude - each convinced that their fears and wants are unique to themselves - and she longs to press herself into their fold and be counted among those whose lives are meshed with the turning of the world.
John Pipkin
#48. Astronomy was born of superstition; eloquence of ambition, hatred, falsehood, and flattery; geometry of avarice; physics of an idle curiosity; and even moral philosophy of human pride. Thus the arts and sciences owe their birth to our vices.
Jean-Baptiste Rousseau
#49. Before a war military science seems a real science, like astronomy; but after a war it seems more like astrology.
Rebecca West
#50. The blast signatures of a detonated supernova and that of a nuclear bomb are identical.
Eric Chaisson
#51. The most remarkable discovery in all of astronomy is that the stars are made of atoms of the same kind as those on the earth.
Richard P. Feynman
#52. My amateur interest in astronomy brought out the term 'magnitude', which is used for the brightness of a star.
Charles Francis Richter
#53. The lifetime of a human being is measured by decades, the lifetime of the Sun is a hundred million times longer. Compared to a star, we are like mayflies, fleeting ephemeral creatures who live out their lives in the course of a single day.
Carl Sagan
#54. I think astronomy is a bad study for you. It makes you feel human insignificance too plainly.
Thomas Hardy
#55. The Age of the Stars had come to an end. Once in a billion years, a feeble supernova illuminated the vestiges of its home; brown dwarfs, neutron stars, blackholes ... lifeless echoes of their former majesty.
Jake Vander Ark
#56. I do not believe there is any one study that can be taken up that will broaden the imagination, that will be the source from which will spring more deep thinking and sincere research than the study of astronomy.
Gene Stratton-Porter
#57. Science is the one human activity that is truly progressive. The body of positive knowledge is transmitted from generation to generation.
Edwin Powell Hubble
#58. And when statesmen or others worry him [the scientist] too much, then he should leave with his possessions. With a firm and steadfast mind one should hold under all conditions, that everywhere the earth is below and the sky above and to the energetic man, every region is his fatherland.
Tycho Brahe
#59. Contemplated as one grand whole, astronomy is the most beautiful monument of the human mind; the noblest record of its intelligence.
Carl Sagan
#60. It is noticed, that the consideration of the great periods and spaces of astronomy induces a dignity of mind, and an indifferenceto death.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
#61. The sculptor, and the painter also, should be trained in these liberal arts: grammar, geometry, philosophy, medicine, astronomy, perspective, history, anatomy, theory of design, arithmetic.
Lorenzo Ghiberti
#62. ...but at night when he turns the awkward [telescope] skyward, he catches his breath at the clarity of the image and the vast populations of stars unknown to him until then, the riotous glittering in the dark crevices between constellations, a convocation of bright spirits waiting to be found.
John Pipkin
#63. We have yet to encounter an observable astronomical phenomenon that require a supernatural element to be added to a model in order to describe the even ... Observations in cosmology look just as they can be expected to look if there is no God.
Victor J. Stenger
#64. [Otto Struve] made the remark once that he never looked at the spectrum of a star, any star, where he didn't find something important to work on.
William Wilson Morgan
#65. Sometimes in astronomy, a heavenly body has been virtually invisible until a single observer detects its presence and points it out to his colleagues, who then see it with increasing clarity. Perhaps a myriad of unknown senses are only awaiting our consciousness.
Marilyn Ferguson
#66. Maybe you who condemn me are in greater fear than I who am condemned.
Giordano Bruno
#68. For astronomy is not only pleasant, but also very useful to be known: it cannot be denied that this art unfolds the admirable wisdom of God.
John Calvin
#69. System debugging, like astronomy, has always been done chiefly at night.
Fred Brooks
#70. It is surrounded by a thin flat ring, inclined to the ecliptic, and nowhere touches the body of the planet.
Christiaan Huygens
#71. Nothing can be more destructive to ambition, and the passion for conquest, than the true system of astronomy. What a poor thing is even the whole globe in comparison of the infinite extent of nature!
Bernard Le Bovier De Fontenelle
#72. I liked math - that was my favorite subject - and I was very interested in astronomy and in physical science.
Sally Ride
#73. I do not believe that anything really worthwhile will come out of the exploration of the slag heap that constitutes the surface of the moon ... Nobody should imagine that the enormous financial budget of NASA implies that astronomy is now well supported.
Fred Hoyle
#74. 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
#75. That's a distinction that's going to make a lot of difference to the ninety percent of humanity that doesn't know the difference between astrology and astronomy,
John Scalzi
#76. Similarly, many a young man, hearing for the first time of the refraction of stellar light, has thought that doubt was cast on the whole of astronomy, whereas nothing is required but an easily effected and unimportant correction to put everything right again.
Ernst Mach
#77. For the twenty million Americans who are hungry tonight, for the homeless freezing tonight, literature is as useless as a knowledge of astronomy.
Andre Dubus
#78. Any patch of sunlight in a wood will show you something about the sun which you could never get from reading books on astronomy. These pure and spontaneous pleasures are 'patches of Godlight' in the woods of our experience.
C.S. Lewis
#79. In the past, men had projected their feminine qualities of emotions, nurturance, and sensitivity onto women. With the recent activation of the feminine centers represented by the asteroids, men have been pressured and encouraged to both "own: and develop these qualities.
Demetra George
#80. Most people today still believe, perhaps unconsciously, in the heliocentric universe every newspaper in the land has a section on astrology, yet few have anything at all on astronomy.
Hannes Alfven
#81. Astronomy was the cradle of the natural sciences and the starting point of geometrical theories.
Cornelius Lanczos
#82. In science, probably ninety-nine percent of the knowable has to be discovered. We know only a few streaks about astronomy. We are only beginning to imagine the force and composition of the atom. Physics has not yet found any indivisible matter, or psychology a sensible soul.
Lincoln Steffens
#84. Computer science has as much to do with computers as astronomy has to do with telescopes.
Edsger Dijkstra
#85. Astronomy is, not without reason, regarded, by mankind, as the sublimest of the natural sciences. Its objects so frequently visible, and therefore familiar, being always remote and inaccessible, do not lose their dignity.
Benjamin Silliman
#86. Above and behind them the Dipper turned on its great handle as if to pour night itself out onto the dreaming continent and each of its seven stars gleamed from between the fitful clouds.
Paulette Jiles
#87. The Babylonian and Assyrian civilizations have perished; Hammurabi, Sargon and Nebuchadnezzar are empty names; yet Babylonian mathematics is still interesting, and the Babylonian scale of 60 is still used in Astronomy.
G.H. Hardy
#88. While astronomers have been exploring outer Space, I have been exploring inner space.
Steven Magee
#89. In creating the world, God used arithmetic, geometry, and likewise astronomy.
Nicholas Of Cusa
#90. But when researchers at Bell Labs discovered that static tends to come from particular places in the sky, the whole field of radio astronomy opened up.
Murray Gell-Mann
#91. The heavens are too immense, too beautiful and varied, to fit into the mind of any one deity; the murmured creeds of fathers and sons are no match for the astronomer's gasp.
John Pipkin
#92. What has been done is little - scarcely a beginning; yet it is much in comparison with the total blank of a century past. And our knowledge will, we are easily persuaded, appear in turn the merest ignorance to those who come after us.
Agnes Mary Clerke
#93. At every level in our inventory, nothing seems special about our Earth, our Sun, our Galaxy, our Local Group. Evidently, mediocrity reigns throughout. Such is our niche in the Universe.
Eric Chaisson
#94. Coelorum perrupit claustra.
He broke through the barriers of the skies.
[Herschel's epitaph]
William Herschel
#95. Let's see if I got this right," she would say to herself. "I've taken an inert gas that's in the air, made it into a liquid, put some impurities in a ruby, attached a magnet, and detected the fires of creation.
Carl Sagan
#96. Although astronomy had made Thales rich, this has remained the stereotype of the philosopher - lost in the stars rather than having his feet on the ground.
Anonymous
#97. I don't believe in astronomy. Or is it astrology? I always get those two confused. But I'll tell you, that Copernicus was full of shit.
Jarod Kintz
#98. Science, enabled by engineering, empowered by NASA, tells us not only that we are in the universe but that the universe is in us. And for me, that sense of belonging elevates, not denigrates, the ego.
Neil DeGrasse Tyson
#99. The morning star isn't a stat," Clary said grumpily. It's a planet. I learned that in astronomy class."
"Mundane education is regrettably prosaic," said Jace.
Cassandra Clare
#100. I was raised a Southern Baptist, and my whole family were Christians. However, my Dad was really into science and astronomy, so I felt very balanced. I still had respect for faith.
Craig Brewer
