E. O. Wilson Quotes

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.

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.

Of all things visible, the highest is the heaven of the fixed stars.

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.

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.

As a navigator, I started studying astronomy because sometimes you're not able to use the equipment, so you'd have to do it the old-fashioned way, figuring out what you were seeing in the sky.

Therefore I would not have it unknown to Your Holiness, the the only thing which induced me to look for another way of reckoning the movements of the heavenly bodies was that I knew that mathematicians by no means agree in their investigation thereof.

You can enjoy stargazing just by going out and learning a couple constellations with your kids.

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

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.

The man in the street does not know a star in the sky.

People give ear to an upstart astrologer who strove to show that the earth revolves, not the heavens of the firmament, the sun and the moon. This fool wishes to reverse the entire scheme of astronomy; but sacred Scripture tells us that Joshua commanded the sun to stand still, not the earth

I'm working to bring celestial objects like the sun and moon into the spaces that we inhabit.

My dad's a physicist and had a key to the St Andrew's observatory, and we used to pop down to see Halley's Comet and Saturn and meteor showers.

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

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.

During the winter my attention was attracted to the changes in the stars and planets in the sky.

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 have seen the movement of the sinews of the sky, And the blood coursing in the veins of the moon.

I like to consider myself a star - a star, that when you look in the sky, it's always there. And on a clear night... a shooting star comes by, and get a little thrill, and you make a little wish. You need both types of stars, the shooting and the constant stars. The heavens include them all.

Most people today still believe, perhaps unconsciously, in the heliocentric universe every newspaper in the land has a section on astrology, yet few have anything at all on astronomy.

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.

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.

In order to know the true situation of a Planet at any particular time, the small set of balls are to be put each on its respective axis; then the winch to be turned round until each index points to the given time.