Telescopes Quotes - Page 2

• Religion has run out of justifications. Thanks to the telescope and the microscope, it no longer offers an explanation of anything important. Where once it used to able, by its total command of a worldview, to prevent the emergence of rivals, it can now only impede and retard-or try to turn back-the measureable advances that we have made.

  Christopher Hitchens

  Running, Science, Important

  Christopher Hitchens (2012). “Long Live Hitch: Three Classic Books in One Volume”, p.268, Atlantic Books Ltd

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• There are stars in the night sky that look brighter than the others, and when you look at them through a telescope you realize you are looking at twins. The two stars rotate around each other, sometimes taking nearly a hundred years to do it. They create so much gravitational pull there's no room around for anything else. You might see a blue star, for example, and realize only later that it has a white dwarf as a companion - that first one shines so bright, by the time you notice the second one, it's too late.

  Jodi Picoult

  Stars, Night, Dwarves

  Jodi Picoult (2009). “My Sister's Keeper: A Novel”, p.492, Simon and Schuster

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• The telescope makes the world smaller; it is only the microscope that makes it larger.

  Gilbert K. Chesterton

  World, Microscopes

  Gilbert K. Chesterton (2013). “The Essential Gilbert K. Chesterton”, p.142, Simon and Schuster

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• Computer science is no more about computers than astronomy is about telescopes, biology is about microscopes or chemistry is about beakers and test tubes. Science is not about tools. It is about how we use them, and what we find out when we do.

  Edsger Dijkstra

  Tools, Use, Tests

  "SIGACT trying to get children excited about CS" by Michael R. Fellows, Computing Research News, archive.cra.org. January, 1993.

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• The task of the right eye is to peer into the telescope, while the left eye peers into the microscope.

  Leonora Carrington

  Eye, Vision, Tasks

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• Microscopes and telescopes really confuse our minds.

  Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

  Science, Technology, Mind

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• The mind of a general ought to resemble and be as clear as the field-glass of a telescope.

  Napoleon Bonaparte

  War, Glasses, Mind

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• For a long time, weve worked on detecting planets with whatever was at hand, making use of existing small telescopes or even amateur telescopes. Its time to move on to the next stage.

  Andrew Gould

  Moving, Hands, Long

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• Oh, my dear Kepler, how I wish that we could have one hearty laugh together. Here, at Padua, is the principal professor of philosophy, whom I have repeatedly and urgently requested to look at the moon and planets through my glass, [telescope] which he pertinaciously refuses to do. Why are you not here? what shouts of laughter we should have at this glorious folly! and to hear the professor of philosophy at Pisa laboring before the grand duke with logical arguments, as if with magical incantations, to charm the new planets out of the sky.

  Galileo Galilei

  Laughter, Philosophy, Science

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• There we measure shadows, and we search among ghostly errors of measurement for landmarks that are scarcely more substantial.

  Edwin Powell Hubble

  Errors, Shadow, Measurement

  Quoted in Dennis Overbye Lonely Hearts of the Cosmos (1991).

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• We begin with friendships, and all our youth is a reconnoitering and recruiting of the holy fraternity they shall combine for thesalvation of men. But so the remoter stars seem a nebula of united light, yet there is no group which a telescope will not resolve; and the dearest friends are separated by impassable gulfs.

  Ralph Waldo Emerson

  Friendship, Stars, Men

  Ralph Waldo Emerson (2008). “Society and Solitude: Twelve Chapters”

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• His eyes are like a telescope. I look into them and I'm transported across the universe to a world I've never been.

  Julie Anne Peters

  Eye, Looks, World

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• I wish you had one of those fairy telescopes that can look into the hearts and souls of people a thousand leagues off, then you might see how much you possess my mind.

  Cuthbert Collingwood, 1st Baron Collingwood

  Love, Heart, People

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• Jazz is like a telescope, and a lot of other music is like a microscope.

  Kamasi Washington

  Jazz, Microscopes, Music Is

  "A New Standard: Kamasi Washington's Modern Jazz Revolution". Interview with Ian Cohen, pitchfork.com. June 9, 2015.

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• I guess the two things I was most interested in were telescopes and steam engines. My father was an engineer on a threshing rig steam engine and I loved the machinery.

  Clyde Tombaugh

  Father, Two, Steam Engines

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• It is impossible not to feel stirred at the thought of the emotions of man at certain historic moments of adventure and discovery - Columbus when he first saw the Western shore, Pizarro when he stared at the Pacific Ocean, Franklin when the electric spark came from the string of his kite, Galileo when he first turned his telescope to the heavens. Such moments are also granted to students in the abstract regions of thought, and high among them must be placed the morning when Descartes lay in bed and invented the method of co-ordinate geometry.

  Alfred North Whitehead

  Morning, Ocean, Adventure

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• Perhaps we are looking at this from a wrong perspective; this search for the truth, the meaning of life, the reason of God. We all have this mindset that the answers are so complex and so vast that it is almost impossible to comprehend. I think, on the contrary, that the answers are so simple; so simple that it is staring us straight in the face, screaming its lungs out, and yet we fail to notice it. We're looking through a telescope, searching the stars for the answer, when the answer is actually a speck of dirt on the telescope lens.

  Jason Calacanis

  Life, Stars, Simple

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• I've never owned a telescope, but it's something I'm thinking of looking into.

  George Carlin

  Science, Thinking

  George Carlin (1998). “Brain Droppings”, Hyperion

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• Pride makes us long for a solution to things – a solution, a purpose, a final cause; but the better telescopes become, the more stars appear.

  Julian Barnes

  Stars, Pride, Long

  Julian Barnes (1984). “Flaubert's parrot”, Vintage

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• One of the stories I love is how Gutenberg’s printing press set off this interesting chain reaction, where all of a sudden people across Europe noticed for the first time that they were farsighted, and needed spectacles to read books (which they hadn’t really noticed before books became part of everyday life); which THEN created a market for lens makers, which then created pools of expertise in crafting lenses, which then led people to tinker with those lenses and invent the telescope and microscope, which then revolutionized science in countless ways.

  Steven Johnson

  Book, Love Is, Europe

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• The computer is a tool akin to a telescope or a microscope; a tool that opens vast frontiers of possibilities and brings them to light; a tool that captures the elemental and animates or holds it still at will; a tool that captures the organic flow of the earth's crust or the wash of a wave, and creates an impossible symmetry, an elemental Rorshach pattern ripe for continued exploration, divulging a thousand revelations.

  John Paul Caponigro

  Light, Tools, Earth

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• It was more work than it seemed, looking through a telescope, as the Earth was continually moving and you had to move along with it. You don't realize how fast this acutally happens, and it's kind of both creepy and wonderful when you stop to think about it. And it makes you realize there's absolutely no way to avoid change. You can sit there and cross your arms and refuse it, but underneath you, things are still spinning away.

  Deb Caletti

  Life, Moving, Thinking

  Deb Caletti (2013). “Love Is All You Need: Wild Roses; The Nature of Jade”, p.59, Simon and Schuster

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• If humankind - from humble farmers in the fields and toiling workers in the cities to teachers, people of independent means, those who have reached the pinnacle of fame or fortune, even the most frivolous of society women - if they knew what profound inner pleasure awaits those who gaze at the heavens, then France, nay, the whole of Europe, would be covered with telescopes instead of bayonets, thereby promoting universal happiness and peace.

  Camille Flammarion

  Teacher, Mean, Independent

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• You can put this another way by saying that while in other sciences the instruments you use are things external to yourself (things like microscopes and telescopes), the instrument through which you see God is your whole self. And if a man's self is not kept clean and bright, his glimpse of God will be blurred - like the Moon seen through a dirty telescope. That is why horrible nations have horrible religions: they have been looking at God through a dirty lens.

  C. S. Lewis

  Dirty, Moon, Men

  C. S. Lewis (2009). “A Year with C. S. Lewis: Daily Readings from His Classic Works”, p.23, Harper Collins

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• The best thing we're put here for's to see; The strongest thing that's given us to see with's a telescope. Someone in every town, seems to me, owes it to the town to keep one.

  Robert Frost

  Science, Towns, Mystery

  Robert Frost (2016). “The Letters of Robert Frost”, p.315, Harvard University Press

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