Quote collection
133 quotes — follow a thought to its full quote page.
"But, because my private lectures and domestic pupils are a great hinderance and intteruption of my studies, I wish to live entirely exempt from the former, and in great measure from the latter. ... in short, I should wish to gain my bread from my writings."
"One can understand nature only when one has learned the language and the signs in which it speaks to us; but this language is mathematics and these signs are methematical figures."
"For my part I consider the earth very noble and admirable precisely because of the diverse alterations, changes, generations, etc. that occur in it incessantly."
"Their vain presumption of knowing all can take beginning solely from their never having known anything; for if one has but once experienced the perfect knowledge of one thing, and truly tasted what it is to know, he shall perceive that of infinite other conclusions he understands not so much as one."
"Names and attributes must be accommodated to the essence of things, and not the essence to the names, since things come first and names afterwards."
"If experiments are performed thousands of times at all seasons and in every place without once producing the effects mentioned by your philosophers, poets, and historians, this will mean nothing and we must believe their words rather than our own eyes?"
"It was granted to me alone to discover all the new phenomena in the sky and nothing to anybody else. This is the truth which neither envy nor malice can supress."
"I truly believe the book of philosophy to be that which stands perpetually open before our eyes, though since it is written in characters different from those of our alphabet it cannot be read by everyone."
"When the moon is ninety degrees away from the sun it sees but half the earth illuminated (the western half). For the other (the eastern half) is enveloped in night. Hence the moon itself is illuminated less brightly from the earth, and as a result its secondary light appears fainter to us."
"Surely it is a great thing to increase the numerous host of fixed stars previously visible to the unaided vision, adding countless more which have never before been seen, exposing these plainly to the eye in numbers ten times exceeding the old and familiar stars."
"Spots are on the surface of the solar body where they are produced and also dissolved, some in shorter and others in longer periods. They are carried around the Sun; an important occurrence in itself."
"They seemed to forget that the increase of known truths stimulates the investigation, establishment and growth of the arts; not their dimination or destruction."
"Nothing physical which sense-experience sets before our eyes, or which necessary demonstrations prove to us, ought to be called in question (much less condemned) upon the testimony of biblical passages..."