Galileo Galilei Quotes

If you start out with a little telescope observing the stars and you keep at it over the years, as I have, it's kind of a dream to one day have an observatory where you can always go and use the telescope conveniently.

After decades of hauling telescopes around in the back of vans and going up to high altitude locations and so forth, I did finally build an observatory, here on Sonoma mountain.

I am just learning to notice the different colors of the stars, and already begin to have a new enjoyment.

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

I live out here in Malibu, where I can see the stars. So I want to get a really nice telescope so I can look at the stars a little bit more.

I was, I remember, I still remember when the first time I pointed the telescope at the sky and I saw Saturn with the rings. It was a beautiful image.

I have a fine lot of telescopes. I have one with which I can see the Mountains in the Moon.

What you do is, you have your drawing board and a pencil in hand at the telescope. You look in and you make some markings on the paper and you look in again.

Where there is an observatory and a telescope, we expect that any eyes will see new worlds at once.

Gentlemen. Build your telescope but just make sure that it is the biggest one in the world because I won’t pay for anything else.

The thing I like about astronomy is being outside at night and seeing the stars in a dark sky. It makes you feel small.

I've been a stargazer for quite a long time, I've got the apps, I know where a lot of things are in the sky and the apps actually can help just to point out what you are looking at because then you do get to see, 'Oh that's Saturn, that's Mars.'

These earthly godfathers of Heaven's lights, that give a name to every fixed star, have no more profit of their shining nights than those that walk and know not what they are.

If one who looked from a tower for a new star, watching for years the same part of the sky, suddenly saw it (quite by chance while thinking of other things), and knew it for the star for which he had hoped, how many millions of men would never care?

I've never owned a telescope, but it's something I'm thinking of looking into.

Sirius, the brightest star in the heavens.... My grandfather would say we're part of something incredibly wonderful - more marvelous than we imagine. My grandfather would say we ought to go out and look at it once in a while so we don't lose our place in it.

The sight of stars always sets me dreaming just as naively as those black dots on a map set me dreaming of towns and villages. Why should these points of light in the firmament, I wonder, be less accessible than the dark ones on the map of France? We take a train to go to Torascon or Roven and we take death to a star.

The number of the fixed stars which observers have been able to see without artificial powers of sight up to this day can be counted. It is therefore decidedly a great feat to add to their number, and to set distinctly before the eyes other stars in myriads, which have never been seen before, and which surpass the old, previously known stars in number more than ten times.

I will imagine you Venus tonight and pray, pray, pray to your star like a Heathen.

The telescope... is a conduit to the cosmos.

I was sat at the bottom of the garden a week ago, smoking a reflective cheroot, thinking about this and that - mostly that, and I just happened to glance at the night sky and I marvelled at the millions of stars glistening like pieces of quicksilver thrown carelessly onto black velvet. In awe I watched the waxen moon ride across the zenith of the heavens like an amber chariot towards the void of infinite space wherein the tethered bolts of Jupiter and Mars hang forever in their orbital majesty; and as I looked at all this, I thought, 'I must put a roof on this lavatory.

And now each night, I count the stars. And each night I get the same number. And when the stars won't come to be counted, I count the holes they leave.

The stars are a free show; it don’t cost anything to use your eyes

Then felt I like some watcher of the skies when a new planet swims into his ken.

For myself, I declare I don't know anything about it. But the sight of the stars always makes me dream.