Astronomers Quotes - Page 4

• 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

  Novelty, Opinion, Astronomy

  14 Copy quote

• Bach is like an astronomer who, with the help of ciphers, finds the most wonderful stars.

  Frederic Chopin

  Stars, Ciphers, Helping

  10 Copy quote

• 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

  Flying, Religion, Facts

  5 Copy quote

• Meton (astronomer in 5th century BC): With the straight ruler I set to work To make the circle four-cornered .

  Aristophanes

  Work, Circles, Four

  4 Copy quote

• When I'm asked about the relevance to Black people of what I do, I take that as an affront. It presupposes that Black people have never been involved in exploring the heavens, but this is not so. Ancient African empires - Mali, Songhai, Egypt - had scientists, astronomers. The fact is that space and its resources belong to all of us, not to any one group.

  Mae Jemison

  Science, Egypt, Space

  186 Copy quote

• To reduce modern climate change to one variable, CO2, or a small proportion of one variable - human-induced CO2 - is not science. To try to predict the future based on just one variable (CO2) in extraordinarily complex natural systems is folly. Yet when astronomers have the temerity to show that climate is driven by solar activities rather than CO2 emissions, they are dismissed as dinosaurs undertaking the methods of old-fashioned science.

  Ian Plimer

  Trying, Climate, Variables

  6 Copy quote

• Astronomers do not commonly use Venereal, in favor of the less contagious-sounding Venutian. Blame the medical community, who snatched the word long before astronomers had any good use for it. I suppose you can't blame the doctors. Venus is the goddess of beauty and love, so she ought to be the goddess of its medical consequences.

  Neil deGrasse Tyson

  Doctors, Beauty And Love, Long

  Neil Degrasse Tyson (2010). “The Sky Is Not the Limit: Adventures of an Urban Astrophysicist”, p.33, Prometheus Books

  6 Copy quote

  Show source

• Two Chinamen visiting Europe went to the theatre for the first time. One of them occupied himself with trying to understand the theatrical machinery, which he succeeded in doing. The other, despite his ignorance of the language, sought to unravel the meaning of the play. The former is like the astronomer, the latter the philosopher.

  Arthur Schopenhauer

  Philosophical, Ignorance, Science

  "Counsels and Maxims". Book by Arthur Schopenhauer (Volume 2 "On Various Subjects"), 1851, as translated by R. J. Hollingdale in "Essays and Aphorisms", 1970.

  6 Copy quote

  Show source

• Astronomers who do not draw theistic or deistic conclusions are becoming rare, and even the few dissenters hint that the tide is against them. Geoffrey Burbidge, of the University of California at San Diego, complains that his fellow astronomers are rushing off to join 'the First Church of Christ of the Big Bang.'

  Hugh Ross

  California, Rushing, Atheism

  17 Copy quote

• 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

  Thinking, Study, Percent

  86 Copy quote

• 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

  Stars, Dna, Cells

  8 Copy quote

• The Poet's License! 't is the right, Within the rule of duty, To look on all delightful things Throughout the world of beauty. To gaze with rapture at the stars That in the skies are glowing; To see the gems of perfect dye That in the woods are growing, And more than sage astronomer, And more than learned florist, To read the glorious homilies Of Firmament and Forest.

  John Godfrey Saxe

  Stars, Glowing, Sky

  John Godfrey Saxe (1866). “The Masquerade: and other poems”, p.25

  7 Copy quote

  Show source

• I was a kind of a one-man army. I could solder circuits together, I could turn out things on the lathe, I could work with rockets and balloons. I'm a kind of a hybrid between an engineer and a physicist and astronomer.

  James Van Allen

  Army, Men, Together

  "Grounded in Space Science". "The Christian Science Monitor" Newspaper, (p. 14), December 22, 1989.

  6 Copy quote

  Show source

• In the popular mind, if Hoyle is remembered it is as the prime mover of the discredited Steady State theory of the universe. "Everybody knows" that the rival Big Bang theory won the battle of the cosmologies, but few (not even astronomers) appreciate that the mathematical formalism of the now-favoured version of Big Bang, called inflation, is identical to Hoyle's version of the Steady State model.

  Fred Hoyle

  Appreciate, Mind, Battle

  4 Copy quote

• Only in the Roman Empire and in Spain under Arab domination has culture been a potent factor. Under the Arab, the standard attained was wholly admirable; to Spain flocked the greatest scientists, thinkers, astronomers, and mathematicians of the world, and side by side there flourished a spirit of sweet human tolerance and a sense of purist chivalry. Then with the advent of Christianity, came the barbarians.

  Adolf Hitler

  Sweet, Tolerance, World

  "Hitler's secret Conversations". Book by H R Trevor-Roper, p. 542, 1953.

  5 Copy quote

  Show source

• 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.

  4 Copy quote

  Show source

• So great was the preference given to sacred over profane learning that Christianity had been in existence fifteen hundred years, and had not produced a single astronomer.

  John William Draper

  Years, Atheism, Fifteen

  John William Draper (1875). “History of the Conflict Between Religion and Science: By John William Draper ...”, p.158, New York, D. Appleton

  4 Copy quote

  Show source

• As the astronomer rejoices in new knowledge which compels him to give up the dignity of our globe as the centre, the pride, and even the final cause of the universe, so do those who have escaped from the Christian mythology enjoy their release from the superstition which fails to make them happy, fails to make them good, fails to make them wise, and has become as great an obstacle in the way of progress as the prior mythologies which it took the place of two thousand years ago.

  Harriet Martineau

  Wise, Christian, Giving Up

  Harriet Martineau (1877). “Harriet Martineau's autobiography, with memorials by M.W. Chapman”, p.356

  6 Copy quote

  Show source

• In the middle 1970s an astronomer I admire put together a modest manifesto called "Objections to Astrology" and asked me to endorse it. I struggled with his wording, and in the end found myself unable to sign, not because I thought astrology has any validity whatever, but because I felt (and still feel) that the tone of the statement was authoritarian.

  Carl Sagan

  Astrology, Atheism, Together

  Carl Sagan (2011). “Demon-Haunted World: Science as a Candle in the Dark”, p.388, Ballantine Books

  8 Copy quote

  Show source

• It must be a very dour and pessimistic astronomer indeed who seriously doubts that there must be countless numbers of intelligent civilizations scattered throughout the universe on other planets which are orbiting around other stars. An attitude which asserts that man is the only intelligent life form in the universe is intolerably arrogant today ... anyone who holds such an opinion today is, fortunately for those who like to see some progress in human conceptions, something of an intellectual freak equivalent to a believer in the Flat Earth Theory.

  Robert K. G. Temple

  Stars, Attitude, Men

  4 Copy quote

• The botanist looks upon the astronomer as a being unworthy of his regard; and he that is glowing great and happy by electrifying a bottle wonders how the world can be engaged by trifling prattle about war and peace.

  Samuel Johnson

  War, Glowing, Looks

  4 Copy quote

• 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

  Moon, Two, Four

  Edna Ferber (1963). “A Kind of Magic”

  4 Copy quote

  Show source

• I've got a telescope in my garden and one of the things I love to do is go out and let the sky, the night sky, the galaxies, the Orion nebula, have an impact on my mind. I find that awe inspiring. And just to contemplate on what the astronomers have revealed to us about the immense size and so on of the universe. I find that very healthy. And it's a good thing to do.

  John Lennox

  Night, Garden, Sky

  Source: www.asenseofawe.net

  48 Copy quote

  Show source

• Astronomers are pure of heart and appealingly puerile. They look into the midnight sky and ask big questions, just as we did when we were in college: Who are we? Where do we come from? And why are we standing around outside on the night before finals, do we want to end up making elevator parts for a living like our father or what?

  Natalie Angier

  Father, Heart, Science

  Natalie Angier (2009). “The Canon: The Beautiful Basics of Science”, p.369, Faber & Faber

  7 Copy quote

  Show source

• Astronomy is so easy to love. ... Fairly or not, physics is associated with nuclear bombs and nuclear waste, chemistry with pesticides, biology with Frankenfood and designer-gene superbabies. But astronomers are like responsible ecotourists, squinting at the scenery through high-quality optical devices, taking nothing but images that may be computer-enhanced for public distribution, leaving nothing but a few Land Rover footprints on faraway Martian soil, and OK, OK, maybe the Land Rover, too.

  Natalie Angier

  Science, Land, Squinting

  10 Copy quote