Astronomers Quotes - Page 5

• A high-school girl, seated next to a famous astronomer at a dinner party, struck up a conversation with him by asking: "What do you do for a living?" "I study astronomy," he replied. "Really? said the teenager, wide-eyed. "I finished astronomy last year."

  James Keller

  Life, Girl, Teenager

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• 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

  Discovery, Thanks, Heat

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• Bach is like an astronomer who, with the help of ciphers, finds the most wonderful stars . . . Beethoven embraced the universe with the power of his spirit . . . I do not climb so high. A long time ago I decided that my universe will be the soul and heart of man.

  Frederic Chopin

  Stars, Heart, Men

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• For it is the duty of an astronomer to compose the history of the celestial motions or hypotheses about them. Since he cannot in any certain way attain to the true causes, he will adopt whatever suppositions enable the motions to be computed correctly from the principles of geometry for the future as well as for the past.

  Andreas Osiander

  Future, Science, Past

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• Astronomers say the universe is finite, which is a comforting thought for those people who can't remember where they leave things.

  Woody Allen

  Science, People, Comforting

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• 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

  Fall, Eye, Science

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• Man is slightly nearer to the atom than to the star. ... From his central position man can survey the grandest works of Nature with the astronomer, or the minutest works with the physicist. ... [K]nowledge of the stars leads through the atom; and important knowledge of the atom has been reached through the stars.

  Arthur Eddington

  Nature, Stars, Science

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• By the way, were we to find life-forms on Venus, we would probably call them Venutians, just as people from Mars would be Martians. But according to rules of Latin genitives, to be “of Venus” ought to make you a Venereal. Unfortunately, medical doctors reached that word before astronomers did. Can’t blame them, I suppose. Venereal disease long predates astronomy, which itself stands as only the second oldest profession.

  Neil deGrasse Tyson

  Latin, Doctors, Long

  Neil deGrasse Tyson (2007). “Death by Black Hole: And Other Cosmic Quandaries”, p.80, W. W. Norton & Company

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• Bach is an astronomer, discovering the most marvellous stars. Beethoven challenges the universe. I only try to express the soul and the heart of man.

  Frederic Chopin

  Stars, Heart, Men

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• Is a man what he seems to the astronomer, a tiny lump of impure carbon and water crawling impotently on a small and unimportant planet? Or is he what he appears to Hamlet? Is he perhaps both as once?

  Bertrand Russell

  Men, Water, Tiny

  Bertrand Russell (2008). “History of Western Philosophy”, p.13, Simon and Schuster

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• I'm a much better musician than astronomer. I think the world got the right choice.

  Brian May

  Thinking, Choices, Musician

  "Biography/ Personal Quotes". www.imdb.com.

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• And the elephant sings deep in the forest-maze
  About a star of deathless and painless peace
  But no astronomer can find where it is.

  Ted Hughes

  Stars, Elephants, Forests

  1972 'Crow's Elephant Totem Song'.

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• 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

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• Astronomers are spherical bastards. No matter how you look at them they are just bastards.

  Fritz Zwicky

  Looks, Matter

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• 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

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• 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

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• 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.

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• 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

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• 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.

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• 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.

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• 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

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• 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

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• 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

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

  Aristophanes

  Work, Circles, Four

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• 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

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