Maria Mitchell Quotes

I have just gone over my comet computations again, and it is humiliating to perceive how very little more I know than I did seven years ago when I first did this kind of work.

Until very recently, the heavenly bodies have been investigated only with reference to their position and their laws of motion, and a quarter of a century ago astronomy was little more than celestial topography.

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

'Animal Kingdom' is a significant comet, and it's cast a tail. It's very hard to see anything post that happening without that.

We are probably nearing the limit of all we can know about astronomy.

One hardly knows where, in the history of science, to look for an important movement that had its effective start in so pure and simple an accident as that which led to the building of the great Washington telescope, and went on to the discovery of the satellites of Mars.

I lost the ball in the moon.

… it is the duty of an astronomer to compose the history of the celestial motions through careful and expert study.

Hubble is the most important telescope in history after Galileo's first telescope.

If I didn't choose art, I would have become an astronomer.

The study and knowledge of the universe would somehow be lame and defective were no practical results to follow.

I have always loved astronomy, and being an astronomer once lurked in the back of my mind. But I was never good at algebra. In fact, I flunked it twice in high school.

I saw, in looking over Cooper, elements of a comet of 1825 which resemble what I get out for this, from my own observations, but I cannot rely upon my own.

But my most favourite pursuit, after my daily exertions at the Foundry, was Astronomy. There were frequently clear nights when the glorious objects in the Heavens were seen in most attractive beauty and brilliancy.

The planets are never the same twice, they're always different, so they could compare the markings I had drawn with their current photographs and they knew that I was drawing what I was really seeing and it wasn't copied from somewhere.

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

I had studied at Harvard and MIT astronomy and a lot about the heavens and the star system and so forth.

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

I do not remember exactly when I became interested in astronomy, but I know it was at a very young age. I did organize an astronomy club for my friends at the age of 11. We would meet once a week to learn about the constellations.

It is clear to everyone that astronomy at all events compels the soul to look upwards, and draws it from the things of this world to the other.

It's like having astronomy without knowing where the stars are.

We do have, and will continue to have an unquenchable curiosity to understand our Solar System.

When Galileo first trained his optic telescope on the heavens and opened up modern optical astronomy, that was the first of the electromagnetic windows out of the universe: light.

It's been said that astronomy is a humbling and, I might add, a character-building experience.

I had the usual friends who pointed out constellations of stars. But it really was watching the stars. It was getting some sense of the motion of the earth. I found it a remarkable thing.