Robert A. Heinlein
Science Fiction Author
"Once you get to earth orbit, you're halfway to anywhere in the solar system."
Orbit quotes
Orbit
88 quotes on this topic — from poets, philosophers, and thinkers across history.
Alastair Reynolds
Science Fiction Author
"Nightside, cities glistened in chains, and a spray of tinkertoy habitats girdled the planet. Gossamer starbridges reached from the equator towards orbit."
Aleister Crowley
Occultist, Writer
"There are no "standards of Right". Ethics is balderdash. Each Star must go on its own orbit. To hell with "moral principle"; there is no such thing."
Nikola Tesla
Inventor, Electrical Engineer
"One day man will connect his apparatus to the very wheel work of the universe. The very forces that motivate the planets in their orbits and cause them to rotate will rotate his own machinery."
Galileo Galilei
Astronomer, Physicist
"E pur si muove. "Albeit It does move". (That's what Galileo purportedly muttered after torturers forced him to recant his theory that the earth orbits the sun.)"
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Browse quotes that often appear alongside orbit — connected by shared ideas and recurring themes.
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Orbit quotes (page 1 of 5)
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"We affect one another quite enough merely by existing. Whenever the stars cross, or is it comets? fragments pass briefly from one orbit to another. On rare occasions there is total collision, but most often the two simply continue without incident, neither losing more than a particle to the other, in passing."
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"Neptune controls Pluto's orbit. Neptune is the bully of that neighborhood."
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"Hold fast, therefore, O circular philosopher, to thy centre, and drive the globe along its orbit by the momentum of thy thought."
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"There's one tiny little gap in the universe left, just about to close. And it takes a lot of power to send this projection. I'm in orbit around a supernova. I'm burning up a sun just to say good bye."
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"The final mystery is oneself... Who can calculate the orbit of his own soul."
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"I can't honestly account for the very personal response that I have to one story and not another, a sense of an orbit, the orbit of a world that draws me as my own life recedes."
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"Poetry is language in orbit."
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"Even in the slippery blur of heat and arms and noise, Lena affected everything in her wake, a pull as powerful as the moon to the tides, or the planets to the sun. I was caught in her orbit, even as she pulled away from mine."
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"Microsoft went into orbit because it had a booster rocket attached to it called IBM."
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"While working among the little plants of the far places of the world we forget the narrowness of our own orbit."
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"Our love could change the orbit of the earth. So, if a meteor ever comes hurtling towards earth with the guarantee of destruction, top scientists may call on us to, well, you know, do it like crazy for the sake of humankind."
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"Knowledge was always the power that kept the Universe in its place and the stars turning in their orbits."
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"I'm no expert on types of cars. As far as i'm concerned, you could send all the cars in the world through a compactor and shoot them out into the stratosphere and put them in orbit around Mars. Except, of course, the taxis that have to be at my disposal when I need them."
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"For discipline is imposed not just on oneself but on those in one's orbit."
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"To me, however, the question of the times resolved itself into a practical question of the conduct of life. How shall I live? We are incompetent to solve the times. Our geometry cannot span the huge orbits of the prevailing ideas, behold their return, and reconcile their opposition. We can only obey our own polarity."
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"The field cannot be well seen from within the field. The astronomer must have his diameter of the earth's orbit as a base to fix the parallax of any other star"
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"Norman Mailer records in his recent essays and public appearances his perfecting of himself as a virile instrument of letters; he is perpetually in training, getting ready to launch himself from his own missile pad into a high, beautiful orbit; even his failures may yet be turned to successes."
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"The miniaturization of electronics, which ultimately was driven by the marketplace, was started by NASA, because it costs money to get something into orbit. So you want to trim your electronics, miniaturize your electronics, miniaturize your satellites."
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"When NASA says they're going into space, they don't mean up and back. They mean orbit."
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"Two tasks at the beginning of your life: to narrow your orbit more and more, and ever and again to check whether you are not in hiding somewhere outside your orbit."
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