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...

It seems impossible that you could get something from nothing, but the fact that once there was nothing and now there is a universe is evident proof that you can.

{Comment to Delambre on chemist Antoine Lavoisier’s execution during the French Revolution}Only a moment to cut off that head and a hundred years may not give us another like it.

Consider now the Milky Way. Here also we see an innumerable dust, only the grains of this dust are no longer atoms but stars; these grains also move with great velocities, they act at a...

At night the sky is pure astronomy.

My feeling is that an observer needs to see four hundred and fifty stars to get that feeling of infinitude, and be swept away…and I didn’t make that number up arbitrarily, that’s the number of...

Cuando hablamos de la “ira” del cielo, la “agitación” del mar, la “resistencia” de los diamantes a ser tallados, la “atracción” que ejerce la Tierra sobre un asteroide cercano o la “excitación” de un átomo,...

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...

The discovery of a new dish does more for the happiness of the human race than the discovery of a star.

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.

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...

What has been done is little—scarcely a beginning; yet it is much in comparison with the total blank of a century past. And our knowledge will, we are easily persuaded, appear in turn the merest...

…and his analysis proved him to be the first of theoretical astronomers no less than the greatest of ‘arithmeticians.

I think that the event which, more than anything else, led me to the search for ways of making more powerful radio telescopes, was the recognition, in 1952, that the intense source in the constellation...

Majority of people find that nature is anything that walks and grows on planet Earth, astronomers have found that this nature stretches way beyond our atmosphere as far as we can see in to the...

The sciences are not sectarian. People do not persecute each other on account of disagreements in mathematics. Families are not divided about botany, and astronomy does not even tend to make a man hate his...

The future of the next generation relies on astronomers obtaining a full understanding ofthe rapidly changing human environmental conditions and the halting of biologically toxic corporategovernment policies. The overloading of the electromagnetic environment is one...

[In high school] my interests outside my academic work were debating, tennis, and to a lesser extent, acting. I became intensely interested in astronomy and devoured the popular works of astronomers such as Sir Arthur...

Thus identified with astronomy, in proclaiming truths supposed to be hostile to Scripture, Geology has been denounced as the enemy of religion. The twin sisters of terrestrial and celestial physics have thus been joint-heirs of...

We need science education to produce scientists, but we need it equally to create literacy in the public. Man has a fundamental urge to comprehend the world about him, and science gives today the only...

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.

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

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...

My days I devote to reading and experiments in chemistry, and I spend many of the clear nights in the study of astronomy. There is, though I do not know how there is or why...

There’s no obvious reason to assume that the very same rare properties that allow for our existence would also provide the best overall setting to make discoveries about the world around us. We don’t think...

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....

Coelorum perrupit claustra.He broke through the barriers of the skies.[Herschel’s epitaph]

The reappearance of the crescent moon after the new moon; the return of the Sun after a total eclipse, the rising of the Sun in the morning after its troublesome absence at night were noted...

The history of the astronomy of the nineteenth century will be incomplete without a catalogue of his labours. He was one of the founders of the Astronomical Society, and his attention to its affairs was...

[They] pervert the course of nature [by saying] the sun does not move and that it is the earth that revolves and that it turns.[John Calvin illustrating his opposition to heliocentrism in a sermon due...

In the beginning of the year 1665 I found the Method of approximating series & the Rule for reducing any dignity of any Binomial into such a series. The same year in May I found...

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...

It is a sad state of affairs that I donot know of any astronomer who fully understands the energy in their own daily environment. Untilthat changes, Dark Energy will always be a mystery to the...

How strange it was, I thought, that when the tiny though thousandfold beauties of the Earth disappeared and the immeasurable beauty of outer space rose in the distant quiet splendor of light, man and the...

who knows if the moon’sa balloon,coming out of a keen cityin the sky–filled with pretty people?( and if you and I shouldget into it,if theyshould take me and take you into their balloon,why thenwe’d go...

Maybe you who condemn me are in greater fear than I who am condemned.

The knowledge that the atoms that comprise life on earth – the atoms that make up the human body, are traceable to the crucibles that cooked light elements into heavy elements in their core under...

[The Old Astronomer to His Pupil]Reach me down my Tycho Brahe, I would know him when we meet,When I share my later science, sitting humbly at his feet;He may know the law of all things,...

National boundaries are not evident when we view the Earth from space. Fanatical ethnic or religious or national chauvinisms are a little difficult to maintain when we see our planet as a fragile blue crescent...

The Greeks made Space the subject-matter of a science of supreme simplicity and certainty. Out of it grew, in the mind of classical antiquity, the idea of pure science. Geometry became one of the most...

There are many arts and sciences of which a miner should not be ignorant. First there is Philosophy, that he may discern the origin, cause, and nature of subterranean things; for then he will be...

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.

I have looked further into space than ever human being did before me. I have observed stars of which the light, it can be proved, must take two million years to reach the earth.[Having identified...

unreal.” We have yet to prove that word.

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

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.

Kepler’s laws, although not rigidly true, are sufficiently near to the truth to have led to the discovery of the law of attraction of the bodies of the solar system. The deviation from complete accuracy...

Astronomy has always been a fascination of mine.

Light and the human is poorly understood by the astronomicalprofession, with many astronomers not understanding which light bulbs they should have in their ownhomes and offices! It is embarrassing that astronomers do not understand the...

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...