#astronomy

And he, like many jaded people, had few pleasures left in life save good food and drink. ↗

— Honoré de Balzac

#gluttony #happiness #pleasure #food

Unlike what you may be told in other sectors of life, when observing the universe, size does matter, which often leads to polite ‘telescope envy’ at gatherings of amateur astronomers. ↗

— Neil deGrasse Tyson

#neil-degrasse-tyson #physics #telescope #universe #life

Philosophy [nature] is written in that great book which ever is before our eyes -- I mean the universe -- but we cannot understand it if we do not first learn the language and grasp the symbols in which it is written. The book is written in mathematical language, and the symbols are triangles, circles and other geometrical figures, without whose help it is impossible to comprehend a single word of it; without which one wanders in vain through a dark labyrinth. ↗

— Galileo Galilei

#cosmology #geometry #math #nature #science

Most people today still believe, perhaps unconsciously, in the heliocentric universe every newspaper in the land has a section on astrology, yet few have anything at all on astronomy. ↗

— Hannes Alfven

#astrology #astronomy #believe #every #few

Superstition is to religion what astrology is to astronomy the mad daughter of a wise mother. These daughters have too long dominated the earth. ↗

— Voltaire

#astronomy #daughter #daughters #dominated #earth

Here I was into astronomy, and here into anthropology, and there I go into geology. It was much more fun to be able to research and write about whatever I wanted to. ↗

— Octavia Butler

#about #anthropology #astronomy #fun #geology

In 1959 the University recognized our work by appointing me to a new Chair of Radio Astronomy. ↗

— Martin Ryle

#astronomy #chair #me #new #our

Your Excellency, I have no need of this hypothesis. ↗

— Pierre Laplace

#atheist #god #humor #mathematics #napoleon

I read not so long ago about the construction of a large telescope in Chile's Atacama Desert, where rainfall can average a millimetre a year and the air is fifty times as dry as the air in Death Valley. Needless to say, skies over the Atacama are pristine. The pilgrim astronomer ventures to the earth’s ravaged reaches in order to peer more keenly at other worlds, and I suppose the novelist is up to something similar. ↗

— Brad Leithauser

#astronomy #chile #metaphor #novelists #telescope

The reappearance of the crescent moon after the new moon; the return of the Sun after a total eclipse, the rising of the Sun in the morning after its troublesome absence at night were noted by people around the world; these phenomena spoke to our ancestors of the possibility of surviving death. Up there in the skies was also a metaphor of immortality. ↗

— Carl Sagan

#immortality #science #death