Look again at that dot. That’s here. That’s home. That’s us. On it everyone you love, everyone you know, everyone you ever heard of, every human being who ever was, lived out their lives. The aggregate of our joy and suffering, thousands of confident religions, ideologies, and economic doctrines, every hunter and forager, every hero...

Full spectrum lights should be used in all daytime offices for good health.

With my naked eye, on nights the moon climbs slowly, sometimes so dusted with rust and rose, brown, and gold tones that it nearly drips earth colors and seems intimately braided with Earth, it feels close, part of this world, a friend. But through the telescope, the moon seems- ironically- farther away…the gray-white moon in...

structure”, that sense of its twisting depths. I remember stars from one horizon to another, making a night sky so plush it still seems like a dream.It was a time in my life when I was every day experiencing something new. I felt open to everything, as though I was made of clay, and the...

We ought to regard the present state of the universe as the effect of its antecedent state and as the cause of the state that is to follow. An intelligence knowing all the forces acting in nature at a given instant, as well as the momentary positions of all things in the universe, would be...

Your Excellency, I have no need of this hypothesis.

If the people of Europe had known as much of astronomy and geology when the bible was introduced among them, as they do now, there never could have been one believer in the doctrine of inspiration. If the writers of the various parts of the bible had known as much about the sciences as is...

I thought to myself: if it’s true that every person has a star in the sky, mine must be distant, dim, and absurd. Perhaps I never had a star.

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.

There are even some stars so remote that their light will reach the Earth only when Earth itself is a dead planet, as they themselves are dead, so that the living Earth will never be visited by that forlorn ray of light, without a living source, without a living destination. Often on fine nights when...

The time will come when diligent research over long periods will bring to light things which now lie hidden. A single lifetime, even though entirely devoted to the sky, would not be enough for the investigation of so vast a subject… And so this knowledge will be unfolded only through long successive ages. There will...

If there is anything that can bind the mind of man to this dreary exile of our earthly home and can reconcile us with our fate so that one can enjoy living,—then it is verily the enjoyment of the mathematical sciences and astronomy.

The more of us that feel the universe, the better off we will be in this world.

When he came to me wanting to do something in astronomy, I got excited. Astronomy is my first love in science. But he wanted to buy a big telescope which we couldn’t afford.

At the moment I am occupied by an investigation with Kirchhoff which does not allow us to sleep. Kirchhoff has made a totally unexpected discovery, inasmuch as he has found out the cause for the dark lines in the solar spectrum and can produce these lines artificially intensified both in the solar spectrum and in...

There is nothing particularly special about that location of the centre of mass. If you were to find yourself at the precise spot that is the centre of mass of the earth-moon system, the only thing unusual that you would notice is that there would be one thousand miles of rock on top of your...

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.

The bright sun was extinguish’d, and the starsDid wander darkling in the eternal space.

Unexplored paths lead to undiscovered treasures

Science is the one human activity that is truly progressive. The body of positive knowledge is transmitted from generation to generation.

The astronomer is, in some measure, independent of his fellow astronomer; he can wait in his observatory till the star he wishes to observe comes to his meridian; but the meteorologist has his observations bounded by a very limited horizon, and can do little without the aid of numerous observers furnishing him contemporaneous observations over...

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.

Any patch of sunlight in a wood will show you something about the sun which you could never get from reading books on astronomy. These pure and spontaneous pleasures are ‘patches of Godlight’ in the woods of our experience.

Attempts to locate oneself within history are as natural, and as absurd, as attempts to locate oneself within astronomy. On the day that I was born, 13 April 1949, nineteen senior Nazi officials were convicted at Nuremberg, including Hitler’s former envoy to the Vatican, Baron Ernst von Weizsacker, who was found guilty of planning aggression...

Philosophy [nature] is written in that great book which ever is before our eyes — I mean the universe — but we cannot understand it if we do not first learn the language and grasp the symbols in which it is written. The book is written in mathematical language, and the symbols are triangles, circles...

For who could better describe the eye than God, Who made it? But as it is clearer than the day that God has left a good deal to our own efforts … we should really follow in these things the thread of nature, by which first principles, reason and daily experience lead us. Therefore, He...

Pero ,por qué hemos de empeñarnos en pensar que el universo fue hecho para nosotros? ,Por qué resulta tan atractiva esa idea? ,Por qué seguimos alimentándola? ,Es tan precaria nuestra autoestima que no podemos conformarnos con nada inferior a un universo hecho a nuestra medida? Naturalmente, la cuestión apela a nuestra vanidad. “Lo que un...

There is a wide yawning black infinity. In every direction the extension is endless, the sensation of depth is overwhelming. And the darkness is immortal. Where light exists, it is pure, blazing, fierce; but light exists almost nowhere, and the blackness itself is also pure and blazing and fierce. But most of all, there is...

unreal.” We have yet to prove that word.

Across the sea of space, the stars are other suns.

The Earth is cylindrical, three times as wide as it is deep, and only the upper part is inhabited. But this Earth is isolated in space, and the sky is a complete sphere in the center of which is located, unsupported, our cylinder, the Earth, situated at an equal distance from all the points of...

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.

Timing is easy to predict through the movement of the stars as they give the propensity of pure potential.

In my opinion the separation of the c- and ac-stars is the most important advancement in stellar classification since the trials by Vogel and Secchi … To neglect the c-properties in classifying stellar spectra, I think, is nearly the same thing as if a zoologist, who has detected the deciding differences between a whale and...

Astronomy has always been a fascination of mine.

You would hardly think, at first, that horrid monsters lie up there waiting to be discovered by any moderately penetrating mind–monsters to which those of the oceans bear no sort of comparison.”What monsters may they be?”Impersonal monsters, namely, Immensities. Until a person has thought out the stars and their inter-spaces, he has hardly learnt that...

Interviewer: Didn’t Sagan want to believe?Druyan: he didn’t want to believe. he wanted to know.

We see it [the as-yet unseen, probable new planet, Neptune] as Columbus saw America from the coast of Spain. Its movements have been felt, trembling along the far-reaching line of our analysis with a certainty hardly inferior to that of ocular demonstration.

His laws changed all of physics and astronomy. His laws made it possible to calculate the mass of the sun and planets. The way it’s done is immensely beautiful. If you know the orbital period of any planet, say, Jupiter or the Earth and you know its distance to the Sun; you can calculate the...

In very different ways, the possibility that the universe is teeming with life, and the opposite possibility that we are totally alone, are equally exciting. Either way, the urge to know more about the universe seems to me irresistible, and I cannot imagine that anybody of truly poetic sensibility could disagree.

[Asteroids are] the vermin of the skies.[Asteroids can block objects of interest on astronomical photographs.]

Science is opposed to theological dogmas because science is founded on fact. To me, the universe is simply a great machine which never came into being and never will end. The human being is no exception to the natural order. Man, like the universe, is a machine. Nothing enters our minds or determines our actions...

There are reasons to doubt that what we call the laws of physics necessarily apply everywhere in the universe—or that they were applicable to every time in its history.

Let’s grant that the stars are scattered through space, hither and yon. But how hither, and how yon? To the unaided eye the brightest stars are more than a hundred times brighter than the dimmest. So the dim ones are obviously a hundred times farther away from Earth, aren’t they?Nope.That simple argument boldly assumes that...

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.

Unlike what you may be told in other sectors of life, when observing the universe, size does matter, which often leads to polite ‘telescope envy’ at gatherings of amateur astronomers.

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.

Science, enabled by engineering, empowered by NASA, tells us not only that we are in the universe but that the universe is in us. And for me, that sense of belonging elevates, not denigrates, the ego.

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.

Mathemata mathematicis scribuntur.