Top 100 Science Astronomy Quotes
#1. 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
#2. 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
#3. 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
#4. When we look up at night and view the stars, everything we see is shinning because of distant nuclear fusion.
Carl Sagan
#5. We are made of star material, and every atom of matter on Earth originated in the core of a star.
Margaret Robertson
#6. Wisdom tolerates blustered opinions, the better to dismiss them later with discovery.
John Pipkin
#7. 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
#8. People say- 'NASA lies.' I say- 'the moon knows it all. Look at the moon and forget the spinning flat world.
Munia Khan
#9. 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
#10. 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
#11. 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
#12. 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
#13. 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
#14. 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
#16. 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
#17. Before a war military science seems a real science, like astronomy; but after a war it seems more like astrology.
Rebecca West
#18. 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
#19. Science is the one human activity that is truly progressive. The body of positive knowledge is transmitted from generation to generation.
Edwin Powell Hubble
#20. 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
#21. ...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
#22. 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
#23. [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
#24. I liked math - that was my favorite subject - and I was very interested in astronomy and in physical science.
Sally Ride
#25. 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
#26. 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
#27. Computer science has as much to do with computers as astronomy has to do with telescopes.
Edsger Dijkstra
#28. 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
#29. 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
#30. 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
#31. Coelorum perrupit claustra.
He broke through the barriers of the skies.
[Herschel's epitaph]
William Herschel
#32. 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
#33. Some of these come from the Big Bang itself, like a faint whisper from that time 13,5 billion years ago when the universe was still filled by the fire of its own creation.
Fred Watson
#34. It is one of the great blessings of youth, this guiltlessness, the source of gentle sleep and peaceful days.
John Pipkin
#35. Computer Science is no more about computers than astronomy is about telescopes
Edsger W. Dijkstra
#36. In the year 1456 ... a Comet was seen passing Retrograde between the Earth and the sun ... Hence I dare venture to foretell, that it will return again in the year 1758.
Edmond Halley
#37. The most important thing is not to work on things that other people are working on because otherwise all you'll do is get the same result as everybody else and you won't make any discoveries, you'll just confirm what's already known.
David Jewitt
#38. Astronomy is ... the only progressive Science which the ancient world produced.
William Whewell
#39. I love travelling and going on wildlife safaris. I have an interest in astronomy. I like reading on current affairs, business and science. I love doing nothing if I can help it.
Viswanathan Anand
#40. Religion ends and philosophy begins, just as alchemy ends and chemistry begins, and astrology ends and astronomy begins.
Richard Dawkins
#41. I look forward to the day when the solar system becomes our collective backyard - explored not only with robots, but with the mind, body, and soul of our species.
Neil DeGrasse Tyson
#42. Until a thing was seen, could it be said to exist? And if his eye through the telescope were the one that brought a certain star into existence, did not that make him a creator?
Kate Grenville
#43. 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
#44. The fool will upset the whole science of astronomy, but as the Holy Scripture shows, it was the sun and not the earth which Joshua ordered to stand still.
Martin Luther
#45. The bright sun was extinguish'd, and the stars
Did wander darkling in the eternal space.
George Gordon Byron
#46. By looking far out into space we are also looking far back into time, back toward the horizon of the universe, back toward the epoch of the Big Bang.
Carl Sagan
#47. Astronomy is not the apex of science or of invention. But it is a test of the cast of temperament and mind that underlies a culture.
Jacob Bronowski
#49. Your Excellency, I have no need of this hypothesis.
Pierre Laplace
#50. Full spectrum lights should be used in all daytime offices for good health.
Steven Magee
#51. The same ratios that govern music give laws to optics and to the movement of the heavens as well. Simple. Elegant. Predictable.
John Pipkin
#52. It is only the sudden and unpredictable appearance of comets that spoils the immutable celestial sphere.
John Pipkin
#53. The irregularities of the motion of Uranus ... in order to find out whether they may be attributed to the action of an undiscovered planet beyond it.
[John Couch Adams on how he began to discover Neptune.]
John Couch Adams
#54. My interest in science was excited at age nine by an article on astronomy in National Geographic; the author was Donald Menzel of the Harvard Observatory. For the next few years, I regularly made star maps and snuck out at night to make observations from a locust tree in our back yard.
Dudley R. Herschbach
#55. Herschel removed the speckled tent-roof from the world and exposed the immeasurable deeps of space, dim-flecked with fleets of colossal suns sailing their billion-leagued remoteness.
Mark Twain
#56. The phenomena of nature, especially those that fall under the inspection of the astronomer, are to be viewed, not only with the usual attention to facts as they occur, but with the eye of reason and experience.
William Herschel
#57. When you organize extraordinary missions, you attract people of extraordinary talent who might not have been inspired by or attracted to the goal of saving the world from cancer or hunger or pestilence.
Neil DeGrasse Tyson
#58. Each star had cost an effort. For each there had been planning, watching and anticipation. Each one recalled to me a place, a time, a season. Each one now has a personality. The stars, in short, had become my stars.
Leslie C. Peltier
#59. Interviewer: Didn't Sagan want to believe?
Druyan: he didn't want to believe. he wanted to know.
Ann Druyan
#60. We, all of us, are what happens when a primordial mixture of hydrogen and helium evolves for so long that it begins to ask where it came from.
Jill Tarter
#61. Reading, writing, mathematics, astronomy, chemistry, medicine, physics, and more were all at one time deep occult secrets. Today, many of these things are taught to children before they begin school. THE OCCULTISM OF THE PAST BECOMES THE SCIENCE OF THE FUTURE.
Donald Michael Kraig
#62. For excellent health and a good skin color, I recommend that people sit next to a shady ultraviolet transmitting window when indoors.
Steven Magee
#63. [Asteroids are] the vermin of the skies.
[Asteroids can block objects of interest on astronomical photographs.]
Walter Baade
#64. He tracks the rise and fall of the glittering darkness thronged with specks and tendrils of luminous secrets. Falling stars crackle in the cold air and prickle his skin. They flash in the corner of his vision where the eye's discernment of light and shadow is most acute.
John Pipkin
#65. The stars, they are as the sun. Each star. Every star. And those spheres- they are worlds, realms, each one different yet the same.
Steven Erikson
#67. That which is now called natural philosophy, embracing the whole circle of science, of which astronomy occupies the chief place, is the study of the works of God, and of the power and wisdom of God in his works, and is the true theology.
Thomas Paine
#68. People who believe they are ignorant of nothing have neither looked for, nor stumbled upon, the boundary between what is known and unknown in the universe.
Neil DeGrasse Tyson
#69. I love biomedical science, I love astronomy, and you can't really do much with those in a fantasy setting.
Elizabeth Moon
#70. If the whole world shared such experiences, we would then have common dreams and everybody could begin thinking about tomorrow. And if everybody thinks about tomorrow, then someday we can visit the sky together.
Neil DeGrasse Tyson
#71. I have looked further into space than ever human being did before me. I have observed stars of which the light, it can be proved, must take two million years to reach the earth.
[Having identified Uranus (1781), the first planet discovered since antiquity.]
William Herschel
#72. Discover the force of the skies O Men: once recognised it can be put to use.
Johannes Kepler
#73. Surely it is a great thing to increase the numerous host of fixed stars previously visible to the unaided vision, adding countless more which have never before been seen, exposing these plainly to the eye in numbers ten times exceeding the old and familiar stars.
Galileo Galilei
#74. I don't think she can see her husband very often, for he teaches the university students during the day, and works at the telescope at night. I wonder if she hopes for cloudy nights and then feels guilty.
Pippa Goldschmidt
#75. The effect of a concept-driven revolution is to explain old things in new ways. The effect of a tool-driven revolution is to discover new things that have to be explained.
Frank Watson Dyson
#76. Astronomy would not provide me with bread if men did not entertain hopes of reading the future in the heavens.
Johannes Kepler
#77. Astronomy is one of the sublimest fields of human investigation. The mind that grasps its facts and principles receives something of the enlargement and grandeur belonging to the science itself. It is a quickener of devotion.
Horace Mann
#78. 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
#79. Le Verrier - without leaving his study, without even looking at the sky - had found the unknown planet [Neptune] solely by mathematical calculation, and, as it were, touched it with the tip of his pen!
Camille Flammarion
#80. ...by shortening the labours doubled the life of the astronomer.
{On the benefit of John Napier's logarithms.}
Pierre-Simon Laplace
#81. As the eclipse progresses, a confusion of chattering birds sweeps low in search of dusk and their shadows skip over the water's surface and it makes perfect sense that these small creatures should be so moved by events beyond their reckoning.
John Pipkin
#82. Each new scientific fact gives rise to new uncertainties, and every pattern of starlight holds both a record and a prophecy.
John Pipkin
#83. Birds know, better than humans, not to spoil the nest.
Carl Sagan
#84. But every day I go to work I'm making a bet that the universe is simple, symmetric, and aesthetically pleasing - a universe that we humans, with our limited perspective, will someday understand.
George Smoot
#85. Essentially all civilizations that rose to the level of possessing an urban culture had need for two forms of science-related technology, namely, mathematics for land measurements and commerce and astronomy for time-keeping in agriculture and aspects of religious rituals.
Frederick Seitz
#86. If you still believe that aliens would travel hundreds of light years to carve temporary graffiti in our wheat, then your imagination is one of the seven wonders of the world, and should be bronzed.
Seth Shostak
#87. Nothing in heaven or earth is content to be alone, and so there must always be something more. The universe is governed by a principle no more complicated than this: that a solitary body will forever attract another to itself.
John Pipkin
#88. So we will cover every possibility. We will take turns at the telescope. I will keep watch in the day, and at night you will take my place, and together we will see to it that no part of the sky goes unobserved.
John Pipkin
#89. As an astronomer in the true sense of the term, Sir John Herschel stood before all his contemporaries. Nay, he stood almost alone.
Richard A. Proctor
#90. There are a multitude of allied branches of knowledge connected with mans condition; the relation of these to political economy is analogous to the connexion of mechanics, astronomy, optics, sound, heat, and every other branch more or less of physical science, with pure mathematics.
William Stanley Jevons
#91. So fantasy was fine early on, and when I discovered science fiction, I was very happy with it, because my first interest in science fiction came with an interest in astronomy.
Octavia Butler
#92. A time will come when men will stretch out their eyes. They should see planets like our Earth.
Christopher Wren
#93. The more of us that feel the universe, the better off we will be in this world.
Neil DeGrasse Tyson
#94. Astronomy ... is of all others the science which seems to present to us the most striking instance of waste in nature.
Richard A. Proctor
#95. Her calculations have always held the utmost accuracy, but mathematics alone will not be enough to guide her; she must learn to trust in chance and, if need be, in accident.
John Pipkin
#96. I got into science fiction by being interested in astronomy first.
Terry Pratchett
#97. 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
#98. Science literacy is being plugged into the forces that power the universe. There is no excuse for thinking that the Sun, which is a million times the size of Earth, orbits Earth.
Neil DeGrasse Tyson
#99. The cosmic perspective not only embraces our genetic kinship with all life on Earth but also values our chemical kinship with any yet-to-be discovered life in the universe, as well as our atomic kinship with the universe itself.
Neil DeGrasse Tyson
#100. I believe that this Nation should commit itself to achieving the goal, before this decade is out, of landing a man on the moon and returning him safely to earth.
John F. Kennedy
