Astronomy Quotes

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.

Plato

It's very expensive to be a professional tennis player with all the travel and the flights and the hotels and everything.

Caroline Wozniacki

For a long time then, I reflected on this confusion in the astronomical traditions concerning the derivation of the motions of the universe's spheres. I began to be annoyed that the movements of the world machine, created for our sake by the best and most systematic Artisan of all, were not understood with greater certainty by the philosophers, who otherwise examined so precisely the most insignificant trifles of this world. For this reason I undertook the task of rereading the works of all the philosophers which I could obtain to learn whether anyone had ever proposed other motions of the universe's spheres than those expounded by the teachers of astronomy in the schools. And in fact I found in Cicero that Hicetas supposed the earth to move. Later I also discovered in Plutarch that certain others were of this opinion. . . . Therefore, having obtained the opportunity from these sources, I too began to consider the mobility of the earth.

Nicholas Copernicus

We're made of star stuff.

Carl Sagan

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.

William Shakespeare

Astronomy is not the apex of science or of invention. But it is a test of the cast of temperament and mind that underlies a culture.

Jacob Bronowski

Astronomy is perhaps the science whose discoveries owe least to chance, in which human understanding appears in its whole magnitude, and through which man can best learn how small he is.

G. C. (Georg Christoph) Lichtenb