Nicolaus Copernicus Quotes

The earth also is spherical, since it presses upon its center from every direction.

It's [the earth's] shape has the rounded appearance of a perfect sphere. This is shown first of all by the name of 'orb' which is bestowed upon it by the general consent of mankind.... Our eyesight also confirms this belief, because the firmament presents the aspect of a concave hemisphere equidistant in every direction, which would be impossible in the case of any other figure.

Everything has to do with geography.

Physicists and astronomers see their own implications in the world being round, but to me it means that only one-third of the world is asleep at any given time and the other two-thirds is up to something.

Don't worry about the world coming to an end today. It is already tomorrow in Australia.

Each man is always in the middle of the surface of the earth and under the zenith of his own hemisphere, and over the centre of the earth.

Hardly anyone has noticed that in the Northern Hemisphere people stir their drinks counterclockwise, whereas the same people stir their drinks clockwise when visiting the Southern Hemisphere.

I could not have told where those damned islands were within 2,000 miles.

The earth is flat. Whoever claims it is round is an atheist deserving of punishment

A matter of no interest to us whether the earth is a sphere or a cylinder or a disk, or concave in the middle like a fan.

I have always read that the world, both land and water, was spherical, as the authority and researches of Ptolemy and all the others who have written on this subject demonstrate and prove, as do the eclipses of the moon and other experiments

I propose to construct a new chart for navigating, on which I shall delineate all the sea and lands of the Ocean in their proper positions under their bearings; and further, I propose to prepare a book, and to put down all as it were in a picture, by latitude from the equator, and western longitude.

Nothing makes the earth seem so spacious as to have friends at a distance; they make the latitudes and longitudes.

My life changed forever the first time I went to the southern hemisphere.

If the earth were not round, heavy bodies would not tend from every side in a straight line towards the center of the earth, but to different points from different sides.

The children would remember for the rest of their lives the august solemnity with which their father, devastated by his prolonged vigil and by the wraith of his imagination, revealed his discovery to them: 'The world is round, like an orange.

I have always read that the world, both land and water, was spherical, as the authority and researches of Ptolemy and all the others who have written on this subject demonstrate and prove, as do the eclipses of the moon and other experiments that are made from east to west, and the elevation of the North Star from north to south.

Kansas is a piece of real estate that completely disproves the theory of roundness as a quality of the planet earth.

There isn't a Parallel of Latitude but thinks it would have been the Equator if it had had its rights.

I demonstrate by means of philosophy that the earth is round, and is inhabited on all sides; that it is insignificantly small, and is borne through the stars.

With the possible exception of the equator, everything begins somewhere.

As, however, the port in reality lies in thirty-two degrees thirty-four minutes, according to the observations that have been made, they went much beyond it, thus making the voyage much longer than was necessary.

The first glimpse that we have of the notions which the Greeks possessed of the shape and the inhabitants of the earth is afforded by the poems passing under the name of Homer.

Cartography and geographic thinking are cool.

Yet if anyone believes that the earth rotates, surely he will hold that its motion is natural, not violent.