Arthur Eddington Quotes

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 create stars.

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.

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

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

When we look out into space, we're looking back in time; the light from a galaxy a billion light-years away, for instance, will take a billion years to reach us. It's an amazing thing. The history is there for us to see. It's not mushed up like the geologic record of Earth. You can just see it exactly as it was.

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

Is it not careless to become too local when there are four hundred billion stars in our galaxy alone.

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 future, children won't perceive the stars as mere twinkling points of light: they'll learn that each is a 'Sun', orbited by planets fully as interesting as those in our Solar system.

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.

When I was in my teens, Yehudi Menuhin, who was at work on his project 'The Music of Man,' introduced me to the great astronomer Carl Sagan. It was Sagan who first opened my eyes to the magnitude of the universe, and essentially to the notion of 'music of the spheres.'

What goes on inside a star is better understood than one might guess from the difficulty of having to look at a little dot of light through a telescope, because we can calculate what the atoms in the stars should do in most circumstances.

I dreamt of being an astronomer; I had a series of 'How and Why' books on the planets and the stars. At that stage, there were only 14 galaxies; now there are multiverses, dark matter, the nano-microscopic world of the interior of atomic structure.

My biggest love is still planets and stars. If I hadn't become an artist, I'd be an astronomer because I still love it so much.

The sun is the primary puzzle in the universe.

I read about eastern philosophy and religion and existentialism. All that introspective thinking got me thinking about the great beyond. That turned my sights from inwards to outwards, and I started becoming interested in the makeup of the universe, and I started reading about astronomy, planets, and galaxies.

Hubble showed us the marvel and majesty of stars being born.

We would look up at the night sky together, and although Stephen wasn't actually very good at detecting constellations, he would tell me about the expanding universe and the possibility of it contracting again and describe a star collapsing in on itself to form a black hole in a way that was quite easy to understand.

Because of technologies from space exploration, we can begin to understand our world's origins, and our lives are improving. These are the reasons why dedicating a life to the sciences and space exploration is so meaningful and rewarding.

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.

There's truth in light. You can tell what elements a star is composed of and the temperature at which it burns by the light it gives off.

As a planetary system, Saturn holds the greatest promise for answering questions that have a far broader scientific reach than Saturn itself.