Quotes by Astronomers - Page 7

(T)he increase of known truths stimulates the investigation, establishment, and growth of the arts.
Galileo Galilei
If we long to believe that the stars rise and set for us, that we are the reason there is a Universe, does science do us a disservice in deflating our conceits?
Carl Sagan
The astonishing fact is that similar mathematics applies so well to planets and to clocks. It needn’t have been this way. We didn’t impose it on the Universe. That’s the way the Universe is. If this is reductionism, so be it.
Carl Sagan
Another glorious feature of many modern science museums is a movie theater showing IMAX or OMNIMAX films. In some cases the screen is ten stories tall and wraps around you. The Smithsonian's National Air & Space Museu, the popular museum on Earth, has premiered in its Langley Theater some of the best of these films. 'To Fly' brings a catch to my throat even after five or six viewings. I've seen religious leaders of many denominations witness 'Blue Planet' and be converted on the spot to the need to protect the Earth's environment
Carl Sagan
Those mothers with hereditary large pelvises were able to bear large-brained babies who because of their superior intelligence were able to compete successfully in adulthood with the smaller-brained offspring of mothers with smaller pelvises.
Carl Sagan
Science is an attempt, largely successful, to understand the world, to get a grip on things, to get hold of ourselves, to steer a safe course. Microbiology and meteorology now explain what only a few centuries ago was considered sufficient cause to burn women to death.
Carl Sagan
Your hand can seize today, but not tomorrow; and thoughts of your tomorrow are nothing but desire. Don’t waste this breath, if your heart isn’t crazy, since "the rest of your life" won’t last forever.
Omar Khayyám
But Lord Crist! whan that it remembreth me Upon my yowthe and on my jolitee It tickleth me aboute myn herte roote. Unto this day it dooth myn herte boote That I have had my world as in my tyme. But age alias! that al wole envenyme Hath me biraft my beautee and my pith. Lat go farewel! the devel go therwith! The flour is goon ther is namoore to telle The bren as I best kan now most I selle.
Geoffrey Chaucer
Measure what can be measured, and make measurable what cannot be measured.
Galileo Galilei
A blade of grass is a commonplace on Earth; it would be a miracle on Mars. Our descendants on Mars will know the value of a patch of green. And if a blade of grass is priceless, what is the value of a human being?
Carl Sagan
Many religions have attempted to make statues of their gods very large, and the idea, I suppose, is to make us feel small. But if that's their purpose, they can keep their paltry icons. We need only look up if we wish to feel small.
Carl Sagan
We make our purpose.
Carl Sagan
I would suggest that science is, at least in my part, informed worship.
Carl Sagan
Science is a way to call the bluff of those who only pretend to knowledge. It is a bulwark against mysticism, against superstition, against religion misapplied to where it has no business being.
Carl Sagan
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 by people around the world; these phenomena spoke to our ancestors of the possibility of surviving death. Up there in the skies was also a metaphor of immortality.
Carl Sagan
The hole in the ozone layer is a kind of skywriting. At first it seemed to spell out our continuing complacency before a witch's brew of deadly perils. But perhaps it really tells of a newfound talent to work together to protect the global environment.
Carl Sagan
It is a beautiful and delightful sight to behold the body of the Moon.
Galileo Galilei
Except for hydrogen, all the atoms that make each of us up—the iron in our blood, the calcium in our bones, the carbon in our brains—were manufactured in red giant stars thousands of light-years away in space and billions of years ago in time. We are, as I like to say, starstuff.
Carl Sagan
We, all of us, are what happens when a primordial mixture of hydrogen and helium evolves for so long that it begins to ask where it came from.
Jill Tarter
Then the Miller fell off his horse.
Geoffrey Chaucer
The sleeping style of each organism is exquisitelyadapted to the ecology of the animal. It is conceivable that animals who are too stupid to be quiet on their own initiative are, during periods of high risk, immobilized by the implacable arm of sleep.
Carl Sagan
We all have a thirst for wonder. It's a deeply human quality. Science and religion are both bound up with it. What I'm saying is, you don't have to make stories up, you don't have to exaggerate. There's wonder and awe enough in the real world. Nature's a lot better at inventing wonders than we are.
Carl Sagan
Probability theory is nothing more than common sense reduced to calculation. -1819
Pierre-Simon Laplace
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.
Edmond Halley
What a wonderful and amazing Scheme have we here of the magnificent Vastness of the Universe! So many Suns, so many Earths, and every one of them stock’d with so many Herbs, Trees and Animals, and adorn’d with so many Seas and Mountains! And how must our wonder and admiration be encreased when we consider the prodigious distance and multitude of the Stars?
Christiaan Huygens
Perhaps the locale of the subjunctive mood willone day be found. Will Latins turn out to be extravagantly endowed and English-speaking peoples significantly short-changed in this minor piece of brain anatomy?
Carl Sagan
It may be that there are kernels of truth in a few of these doctrines, but their widespread acceptancebetokens a lack of intellectual rigor, an absence of skepticism, a need to replace experiments by desires.
Carl Sagan
Drink! for you know not whence you came nor why: Drink! for you know not why you go nor where.
Omar Khayyám
God invented space so that not everything had to happen in Princeton.
Martin J. Rees
So far as I know, childbirth is generally painful in only one of the millions of species on Earth: human beings. This must be a consequence of the recent and continuing increase in cranial volume... Childbirth is painful because the evolution of the human skull has been spectacularly fast and recent.
Carl Sagan
To base the unexplainabilty and the immense wonder of nature onto an other miracle (God) is unnecessary and not acceptable for any serious th
Fritz Zwicky
I much prefer the sharpest criticism of a single intelligent man to the thoughtless approval of the masses.
Johannes Kepler
Christianity may be good and Satanism evil. Under the Constitution, however, both are neutral. This is an important, but difficult, concept for many law enforcement officers to accept. They are paid to uphold the penal code, not the Ten Commandments … The fact is that far more crime and child abuse has been committed by zealots in the name of God, Jesus and Mohammed than has ever been committed in the name of Satan. Many people don’t like that statement, but few can argue with it.
Carl Sagan
Thus, an inhibition center developed below what in humans is the temporal lobe, to turn off much of the functioning of the reptilian brain; and an activation center evolved in the pons to turn on the R-complex, but harmlessly, during sleep.
Carl Sagan
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
William Herschel
Science gropes and staggers toward improved understanding.
Carl Sagan
We have held the peculiar notion that a person or society that is a little different from us, whoever we are, is somehow strange or bizarre, to be distrusted or loathed. Think of the negative connotations of words like alien or outlandish. And yet the monuments and cultures of each of our civilizations merely represent different ways of being human. An extraterrestrial visitor, looking at the differences among human beings and their societies, would find those differences trivial compared to the similarities.
Carl Sagan
[an encounter in space] "Some celestial event. No--no words--no words to describe it. Poetry! They should have sent a poet. So beautiful. So beautiful...I had no idea. I had no idea.
Carl Sagan
People are not stupid. They believe things for reasons. The last way for skeptics to get the attention of bright, curious, intelligent people is to belittle or condescend or to show arrogance toward their beliefs.
Carl Sagan
This looks very much as if the integration of the day's experience into our memory, the forging of new neural links, is either an easier or a more urgent task. As the night wears on and this function is completed, the more affecting dreams, the more bizarrematerial, the fears and lusts and other powerful emotions of thedream material emerge.
Carl Sagan
I am an atheist, but as far as blowing up the world in a nuclear war goes, I tell them not to worry.
Fred Hoyle
The suppression of uncomfortable ideasmay be common in religion and politics, but it is not the path to knowledge; it has no placein the endeavor of science.
Carl Sagan
What an astonishing thing a book is. It's a flat object made from a tree with flexible parts on which are imprinted lots of funny dark squiggles. But one glance at it and you're inside the mind of another person, maybe somebody dead for thousands of years. Across the millennia, an author is speaking clearly and silently inside your head, directly to you. Writing is perhaps the greatest of human inventions, binding together people who never knew each other, citizens of distant epochs. Books break the shackles of time. A book is proof that humans are capable of working magic." (1980)]
Carl Sagan
When you look more generally at life on Earth, you find that it is all the same kind of life. There are not many different kinds; there's only one kind. It uses about fifty fundamental biological building blocks, organic molecules.
Carl Sagan
Words simply mean what people think they mean when they say them.
Mike Brown
One of the great commandments of science is, "Mistrust arguments from authority." (Scientists, being primates, and thus given to dominance hierarchies, of course do not always follow this commandment.) Too many such arguments have proved too painfully wrong. Authorities must prove their contentions like everybody else. This independence of science, its occasional unwillingness to accept conventional wisdom, makes it dangerous to doctrines less self critical, or with pretensions of certitude.
Carl Sagan
If you want to save your child from polio, you can pray or you can inoculate. ... Choose science.
Carl Sagan
Why do we put up with it? Do we like to be criticized? No, no scientist enjoys it. Every scientist feels a proprietary affection for his or her ideas and findings. Even so, you don’t reply to critics, Wait a minute; this is a really good idea; I’m very fond of it; it’s done you no harm; please leave it alone. Instead, the hard but just rule is that if the ideas don’t work, you must throw them away.
Carl Sagan
Dust into dust and under dust to lie Sans wine sans song sans singer and - sans end.
Omar Khayyám
Arguments from authority carry little weight – authorities have made mistakes in the past. They will do so again in the future. Perhaps a better way to say it is that in science there are no authorities; at most, there are experts.
Carl Sagan
We can judge our progress by the courage of our questions and the depth of our answers, our willingness to embrace what is true rather than what feels good.
Carl Sagan
Advances in medicine and agriculture have saved vastly more lives than have been lost in all the wars in history.
Carl Sagan
It is morally as bad not to care whether a thing is true or not, so long as it makes you feel good, as it is not to care how you got your money as long as you have got it.
Carl Sagan
Civilization is a product of the cerebral cortex.
Carl Sagan
And when statesmen or others worry him [the scientist] too much, then he should leave with his possessions. With a firm and steadfast mind one should hold under all conditions, that everywhere the earth is below and the sky above and to the energetic man, every region is his fatherland.
Tycho Brahe
I don't want to believe. I want to know.
Carl Sagan
The Divine Light is always in man, presenting itself to the senses and to the comprehension, but man rejects it.
Giordano Bruno
In the midst of all dwells the Sun. For who could set this luminary in another or better place in this most glorious temple, than whence he can at one and the same time brighten the whole.
Nicolaus Copernicus
It matters not how long we live but how.
Francis Bailey
There is a reward structure in science that is very interesting: Our highest honors go to those who disprove the findings of the most revered among us. So Einstein is revered not just because he made so many fundamental contributions to science, but because he found an imperfection in the fundamental contribution of Isaac Newton.
Carl Sagan