William Whewell Quotes

Astronomy is not the apex of science or of invention. But it is a test of the cast of temperament and mind that underlies a culture.

Astronomy is one of the sublimest fields of human investigation. The mind that grasps its facts and principles receives something of the enlargement and grandeur belonging to the science itself. It is a quickener of devotion.

Astronomy is perhaps the science whose discoveries owe least to chance, in which human understanding appears in its whole magnitude, and through which man can best learn how small he is.

It turns out that the history of astrophysics is where we perfected time keeping.

A high-school girl, seated next to a famous astronomer at a dinner party, struck up a conversation with him by asking: "What do you do for a living?" "I study astronomy," he replied. "Really? said the teenager, wide-eyed. "I finished astronomy last year."

A single lifetime, even though entirely devoted to the sky, would not be enough for the study of so vast a subject. A time will come when our descendants will be amazed that we did not know things that are so plain to them.

Of all the sciences, astronomy was the one the superstitious liked least.

Scientists have wonderfully explained the organization of the universe, but that's really all it claims to do, and I think it does that very successfully.

For astronomy is not only pleasant, but also very useful to be known: it cannot be denied that this art unfolds the admirable wisdom of God.

Astronomy to the selfish becomes astrology.

I cannot possibly conceive of my planet Earth as the centre of a three-tiered universe. I know rather that the sun, around which my planet Earth revolves, is a middle sized star in a galaxy called the Milky Way that has over a hundred billion other suns or stars within it.

The history of astronomy is a history of receding horizons.

Many people find the universe confusing - it's not.

In less than a hundred years, we have found a new way to think of ourselves. From sitting at the center of the universe, we now find ourselves orbiting an average-sized sun, which is just one of millions of stars in our own Milky Way galaxy.

I am an astronomer, and my job is to look to the heavens to better understand the universe and our place in it.

From the moment of using rocket devices, a great new era will begin in astronomy: the epoch of the more intensive study of the firmament.

Who are we? We find that we live on an insignificant planet of a humdrum star lost in a galaxy tucked away in some forgotten corner of a universe in which there are far more galaxies than people.

My interest in astronomy grew from the play 'Space' that I did, where I had to learn where my character was from. I had to study the stars and figure where everything was and how I got here and all of those things.

I don't know why. I'm fascinated with stars and space. I just love them.

If I had to go back to school for anything, I'd go for astronomy.

I am a great fan of the universe, which I take literally: as one. All of it interests me, and it interests me in detail.

The heavenly light you admire is fossil-light, it's the unfathomably distant past you gaze into, stars long extinct

Aristotle's opinion... that comets were nothing else than sublunary vapors or airy meteors... prevailed so far amongst the Greeks, that this sublimest part of astronomy lay altogether neglected; since none could think it worthwhile to observe, and to give an account of the wandering and uncertain paths of vapours floating in the Ether.

The immense distances to the stars and the galaxies mean that we see everything ins pace int he past, some as they were before the Earth came to be. Telescopes are time machines.

Astronomy, that micography of heaven, is the most magnificent of the sciences. ... Astronomy has its clear side and its luminous side; on its clear side it is tinctured with algebra, on its luminous side with poetry.