Top 90 Galileo Galilei Quotes (2024 Update)
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51. “Showing a greater fondness for their own opinions than for truth, they sought to deny and disprove the new things which, if they had cared to look for themselves, their own senses would have demonstrated to them.”

— Galileo Galilei

52. “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.”

— Galileo Galilei

53. “My dear Kepler, what would you say of the learned here, who, replete with the pertinacity of the asp, have steadfastly refused to cast a glance through the telescope? What shall we make of this? Shall we laugh, or shall we cry?”

— Galileo Galilei

54. “Infinities and indivisibles transcend our finite understanding, the former on account of their magnitude, the latter because of their smallness; Imagine what they are when combined.”

— Galileo Galilei

55. “It is necessary for the Bible, in order to be accommodated to the understanding of every man, to speak many things which appear to differ from the absolute truth so far as the bare meaning of the words is concerned.”

— Galileo Galilei

56. “It is surely harmful to souls to make it a heresy to believe what is proved.”

— Galileo Galilei

57. “The hypothesis is pretty; its only fault is that it is neither demonstrated nor demonstrable. Who does not see that this is purely arbitrary fiction that puts nothingness as existing and proposes nothing more than simple noncontradiciton?”

— Galileo Galilei

58. “We must say that there are as many squares as there are numbers.”

— Galileo Galilei

59. “I think that in the discussion of natural problems we ought to begin not with the Scriptures, but with experiments, and demonstrations.”

— Galileo Galilei

60. “They who depend upon manifest observations will philosophize better than those who persist in opinions repugnant to the senses.”

— Galileo Galilei

61. “With regard to matters requiring thought: the less people know and understand about them, the more positively they attempt to argue concerning them.”

— Galileo Galilei

62. “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.”

— Galileo Galilei

63. “I would say here something that was heard from an ecclesiastic of the most eminent degree: The intention of the Holy Spirit is to teach us how one goes to heaven, not how the heavens go.”

— Galileo Galilei

64. “The greatness and the glory of God shine forth marvelously in all His works, and is to be read above all in the open book of the heavens.”

— Galileo Galilei

65. “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.”

— Galileo Galilei

66. “Nothing can be taught to a man, only it’s possibly to help him to discover it inside.”

— Galileo Galilei

67. “The doctrine that the earth is neither the center of the universe nor immovable, but moves even with a daily rotation, is absurd, and both philosophically and theologically false, and at the least an error of faith.”

— Galileo Galilei

68. “Well, since paradoxes are at hand, let us see how it might be demonstrated that in a finite continuous extension it is not impossible for infinitely many voids to be found.”

— Galileo Galilei

69. “Some, merely to contradict what I had said, did not scruple to cast doubt upon things they had seen with their own eyes again and again.”

— Galileo Galilei

70. “Philosophy itself cannot but benefit from our disputes, for if our conceptions prove true, new achievements will be made; if false, their refutation will further confirm the original doctrines.”

— Galileo Galilei

71. “I do not know what to say in a case so surprising, so unlooked for and so novel.”

— Galileo Galilei

72. “I believe that the intention of Holy Writ was to persuade men of the truths necessary to salvation; such as neither science nor other means could render credible, but only the voice of the Holy Spirit.”

— Galileo Galilei

73. “The earth, in fair and grateful exchange, pays back to the moon an illumination similar to that which it receives from her throughout nearly all the darkest gloom of the night.”

— Galileo Galilei

74. “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.”

— Galileo Galilei

75. “I do not think it is necessary to believe that the same God who has given us our senses, reason, and intelligence wished us to abandon their use, giving us by some other means the information that we could gain through them.”

— Galileo Galilei

76. “They seemed to forget that the increase of known truths stimulates the investigation, establishment and growth of the arts; not their dimination or destruction.”

— Galileo Galilei

77. “I am certainly interested in a tribunal in which, for having used my reason, I was deemed little less than a heretic. Who knows but men will reduce me from the profession of a philosopher to that of historian of the Inquisition!”

— Galileo Galilei

78. “It is very pious to say and prudent to affirm that the holy Bible can never speak untruth – whenever its true meaning is understood. But I believe nobody will deny that it is often very abstruse, and may say things which are quite different from wha.”

— Galileo Galilei

79. “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.”

— Galileo Galilei

80. “To command their professors of astronomy to refute their own observations is to command them not to see what they do see and not to understand what they do understand.”

— Galileo Galilei

81. “In the sciences, the authority of thousands of opinions is not worth as much as one tiny spark of reason in an individual man.”

— Galileo Galilei

82. “To our natural and human reason, I say that these terms ‘large,’ ‘small,’ ‘immense,’ ‘minute,’ etc. are not absolute but relative; the same thing in comparison with various others may be called at one time ‘immense’ and at another ’imperceptible.”

— Galileo Galilei

83. “In the future, there will be opened a gateway and a road to a large and excellent science into which minds more piercing than mine shall penetrate to recesses still deeper.”

— Galileo Galilei

84. “I abjure with a sincere heart and unfeigned faith, I curse and detest the said errors and heresies, and generally all and every error and sect contrary to the Holy Catholic Church.”

— Galileo Galilei

85. “In time you may discover everything that can be discovered, and still your progress will only be progress away from humanity. The distance between you and them can one day become so great that your joyous cry over some new gain could be answered by an universal shriek of horror.”

— Galileo Galilei

86. “Holy Writ was intended to teach men how to go to Heaven not how the heavens go.”

— Galileo Galilei

87. “But some, besides allegiance to their original error, possess I know not what fanciful interest in remaining hostile not so much toward the things in question as toward their discoverer.”

— Galileo Galilei

88. “There is not a single effect in Nature, not even the least that exists, such that the most ingenious theorists can ever arrive at a complete understanding of it. This vain presumption of understanding everything can have no other basis than never understanding anything. For anyone who had experienced just once the perfect understanding of one single thing, and had truly tasted how knowledge is attained, would recognise that of the infinity of other truths he understands nothing.”

— Galileo Galilei

89. “To me, a great ineptitude exists on the part of those who would have it that God made the universe more in proportion to the small capacity of their reason than to His immense, His infinite, power.”

— Galileo Galilei

90. “It vexes me when they would constrain science by the authority of the Scriptures, and yet do not consider themselves bound to answer reason and experiment.”

— Galileo Galilei

91. “To apply oneself to great inventions, starting from the smallest beginnings, is no task for ordinary minds; to divine that wonderful arts lie hid behind trivial and childish things is a conception for superhuman talents.”

— Galileo Galilei

92. “I do not feel obliged to believe that the same God who has endowed us with senses, reason, and intellect has intended us to forgo their use and by some other means to give us knowledge which we can attain by them.”

— Galileo Galilei

93. “Who would set a limit to the mind? Who would dare assert that we know all there is to be known?”

— Galileo Galilei

94. “The fear of infinity is a form of myopia that destroys the possibility of seeing the actual infinite, even though it in its highest form has created and sustains us.”

— Galileo Galilei

95. “My dear Kepler, I wish that we might laugh at the stupidity of the human herd. What do you have to say about the principal philosophers of this academy who are filled with the stubbornness of an asp and do not want to look at either the planets, the moon or the telescope, even though I have freely and deliberately offered them the opportunity a thousand times? Truly, just as the asp stops its ears, so do these philosophers shut their eyes to the light of truth.”

— Galileo Galilei

96. “Philosophy is written in this all-encompassing book that is constantly open to our eyes, that is the universe; but it cannot be understood unless one first learns to understand the language and knows the characters in which it is written. It is written in mathematical language, and its characters are triangles, circles, and other geometrical figures; without these it is humanly impossible to understand a word of it, and one wanders in a dark labyrinth.”

— Galileo Galilei

97. “All inconveniences will be removed as you propound them. Up to this point, only the first and most general reasons have been mentioned which render it not entirely improbable that the daily rotation belongs to the earth rather than to the rest of the universe.”

— Galileo Galilei

98. “I entertain no doubts as to the truth of the transfinites, which I have recognized with God’s help.”

— Galileo Galilei