Nicolaus Copernicus Quotes

In the course of writing 'First Light,' I climbed all over and through the Hale Telescope, where I found rooms, stairways, tunnels, and abandoned machines leaking oil. My notebooks show tooth-marks where I gripped them with my teeth while climbing around inside the telescope, and the notebooks are stained with Flying Horse telescope oil.

Thinking about the universe has now been handed over to specialists. The rest of us merely read about it.

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 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 to the selfish becomes astrology.

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.

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

Astronomers are spherical bastards. No matter how you look at them they are just bastards.

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.

The Keck telescope, which is the largest in the world, had opened just before I began my faculty position at UCLA.

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.

Astronomers ought to be able to ask fundamental questions without accelerators.

If you take 10,000 people at random, 9,999 have something in common: their interests in business lie on or near the Earth's surface. The odd one out is an astronomer, and I am one of that strange breed.

It's hard to know which stars in the sky will turn into black holes. And which ones will open up worm holes into entire new universes.

Classifying the stars has helped materially in all studies of the structure of the universe.

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.

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.

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.

We shouldn't persuade people that we can simply conjure up the sun and the moon: at the most, we can deliver a telescope.

You cannot exploit the advantages of getting above the atmosphere unless you are able to get up there reasonably large-sized telescopes and unless you are able to keep these telescopes pointing at one region of the sky for long periods of time to a high degree of accuracy.

Why would you listen to an astronomer about a planet?

The sun is the primary puzzle in the universe.

Because Hubble's been up so many years now, it's actually given us a window to things like... how planets' atmospheres actually change, evolve... over time.

It now seems logical that all the stars, like our own sun, must have formed with a system of planets around them.

My thesis project was to identify quasars, which are very distant, very energetic objects and still quite mysterious.