Orbit Quotes - Page 6

• This success permits us to hope that after thirty or forty years of observation on the new Planet [Neptune], we may employ it, in its turn, for the discovery of the one following it in its order of distances from the Sun. Thus, at least, we should unhappily soon fall among bodies invisible by reason of their immense distance, but whose orbits might yet be traced in a succession of ages, with the greatest exactness, by the theory of Secular Inequalities.

  Urbain Le Verrier

  Distance, Fall, Science

  "The Planet Neptune: An Exposition and History". Book by John Pringle Nichol, 1848.

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• If life is not always poetical, it is at least metrical. Periodicity rules over the mental experience of man, according to the path of the orbit of his thoughts. Distances are not gauged, ellipses not measured, velocities not ascertained, times not known. Nevertheless, the recurrence is sure. What the mind suffered last week, or last year, it does not suffer now; but it will suffer again next week or next year.

  Alice Meynell

  Life, Distance, Men

  Alice Meynell (2013). “The Essential Alice Meynell Collection”, p.384, eBookIt.com

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• Bodies like the earth are not made to move on curved orbits by a force called gravity; instead, they follow the nearest thing to a straight path in a curved space, which is called a geodesic. A geodesic is the shortest (or longest) path between two nearby points.

  Stephen Hawking

  Moving, Two, Space

  Stephen W. Hawking (1990). “A Brief History of Time: From the Big Bang to Black Holes”, Bantam

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• In the [Michael] Jackson orbit, normal is relative. What a mess.

  Roxanne Roberts

  Normal, Mess, Relative

  Source: www.washingtonpost.com

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• The moon is not kept in her orbit round the earth, nor the earth in her orbit round the sun, by a force that varies merely in the inverse ratio of the squares of the distances.

  Thomas Malthus

  Distance, Moon, Squares

  Thomas Malthus (2015). “An Essay on the Principle of Population: Illustrated”, p.111, eKitap Projesi

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• There's almost no gravity at the surface. If you were standing on [the surface], you could jump into orbit.

  Donald E. Brownlee

  Gravity, Surface, Standing

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• Politics and the affairs of State are dissociated from the orbit of the individual, and in so far as they cannot be repossessed as his living private property they must be rendered impotent.

  John Carroll

  Affair, Individual, States

  John Carroll (2010). “Break-Out from the Crystal Palace: The Anarcho-Psychological Critique: Stirner, Nietzsche, Dostoevsky”, p.44, Taylor & Francis

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• See what the world looks like from orbit. Well, in that way, at least, there was profit to be had. Nobody could look down at the planet, green and blue, with no borders in evidence and no sign of human habitation, and not get his perspective forever altered.

  Jack McDevitt

  Blue, Perspective, Forever

  "Odyssey". Book by Jack McDevitt, 2006.

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• I am not absolutely positive there is no god. Only in the sense that I'm not absolutely positive there is no large china teapot in orbit in the solar system.

  Richard Dawkins

  China, Teapots, There Is No God

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• Human relations just are not fixed in their orbits like the planets -- they're more like galaxies, changing all the time, exploding into light for years, then dying away.

  May Sarton

  Years, Light, Dying

  May Sarton (2014). “Crucial Conversations: A Novel”, p.37, Open Road Media

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• But who does not see that the work goes beyond the one who created it? It marches before him and he will never again be able to catch up with it, it soon leaves his orbit, it will soon belong to another, since he, more quickly than his work, changes and becomes deformed, since before his work dies, he dies.

  Michel Seuphor

  Doe, Able, March

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• Often a non-Christian knows something about the earth, the heavens, and the other parts of the world, about the motions and orbits of the stars and even their sizes and distances... and this knowledge he holds with certainty from reason and experience. It is thus offensive and disgraceful for an unbeliever to hear a Christian talk nonsense about such things, claiming that what he is saying is based in Scripture. We should do all that we can to avoid such an embarrassing situation, which people see as ignorance in the Christian and laugh to scorn.

  Saint Augustine

  Christian, Stars, Distance

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• I’m struck again by the irony that spaceflight-conceived in the cauldron of nationalist rivalries and hatreds-brings with it a stunning transnational vision. You spend even a little time contemplating the Earth from orbit and the most deeply engrained nationalisms begin to erode. They seem the squabbles of mites on a plum.

  Carl Sagan

  Hatred, Vision, Earth

  Carl Sagan, Ann Druyan (2011). “Pale Blue Dot: A Vision of the Human Future in Space”, p.199, Ballantine Books

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• Even in the slippery blur of heat and arms and noise, Lena affected everything in her wake, a pull as powerful as the moon to the tides, or the planets to the sun. I was caught in her orbit, even as she pulled away from mine.

  Kami Garcia

  Powerful, Moon, Arms

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• Maybe that's what growing up means, in the end - you go far enough in the direction of - somewhere - and you realise that you've neutered the capacity of the term home to mean anything. [...] We don't get an endless number of orbits away from the place where meaning first arises, that treasure-house of first experiences. What we learn, instead, is that our adventures secure us in our isolation. Experience revokes our licence to return to simpler times. Sooner or later, there's no place remotely like home.

  Gregory Maguire

  Growing Up, Home, Adventure

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• There was a time when she had indulged in the hypothetical for hours a day, plotting the map that had led her here. But no life is a line, and hers was an uneven orbit around a dark star, a moth circling a dead bulb, searching for the light it once held.

  Anthony Marra

  Stars, Dark, Light

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• For if there were a list of cosmic things that unite us, reader and writer, visible as it scrolled up into the distance, like the introduction to some epic science-fiction film, then shining brightly on that list would be the fact that we exist in a financial universe that is subject to massive gravitational pulls from states. States tug at us. States bend us. And, tirelessly, states seek to determine our orbits.

  Mohsin Hamid

  Distance, Epic, Shining

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• Suns are extinguished or become corrupted, planets perish and scatter across the wastes of the sky; other suns are kindled, new planets formed to make their revolutions or describe new orbits, and man, an infinitely minute part of a globe which itself is only an imperceptible point in the immense whole, believes that the universe is made for himself.

  Baron d'Holbach

  Believe, Men, Sky

  "The Enlightenment". Book by Norman Hampson, 1968.

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• The digital world has been in a separate orbit from our medical cocoon, and it's time the boundaries be taken down.

  Eric Topol

  Taken, Cocoons, World

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• Though we feel we can choose what we do, our understanding of the molecular basis of biology shows that biological processes are governed by the laws of physics and chemistry and therefore are as determined as the orbits of the planets.

  Stephen Hawking

  Law, Understanding, Religion

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• New Yorkers love the bigness -- the skyscrapers, the freedom, the lights. But they also love it when they can carve out some smallness for themselves. When the guy at the corner store knows which newspaper you want. When the barista has your order ready before you open your mouth. When you start to recognize the people in your orbit, and you know that, say, if you're waiting for the subway at eight fifteen on the dot, odds are the redhead with the red umbrella is going to be there too.

  David Levithan

  Odds, Order, Eight

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• What an awful thing then, being there in our house together with our daughter gone, trying to be equal to so many sudden orders of sorrow, any one of which alone would have wrenched us from our fragile orbits around each other.

  Paul Harding

  Daughter, Order, House

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• I have a theory that kitchens, once they reach a certain level of complexity, attract new gadgets into their orbit, like planets. Only this can account for the fact that I own two melon ballers.

  Kerry Greenwood

  Two, Kitchen, Gadgets

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• The first man-made satellite to orbit the earth was named Sputnik. The first living creature in space was Laika. The first rocket to the Moon carried a red flag. The first photograph of the far side of the Moon was made with a Soviet camera. If a man orbits the earth this year his name will be Ivan.

  John F. Kennedy

  Future, Moon, Men

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• The Fitchburg Railroad touches the pond about a hundred rods south of where I dwell. I usually go to the village along its causeway, and am, as it were, related to society by this link. The men on the freight trains, who go over the whole length of the road, bow to me as to an old acquaintance, they pass me so often, and apparently they take me for an employee; and so I am. I too would fain be a track-repairer somewhere in the orbit of the earth.

  Henry David Thoreau

  Men, Track, Ponds

  Henry David Thoreau (2017). “Walden and on the Duty of Civil Disobedience”, p.98, Library of Alexandria

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