Johannes Kepler Quotes

1. “Science is the process of thinking God’s thoughts after Him.”

— Johannes Kepler

2. “The chief aim of all investigations of the external world should be to discover the rational order and harmony which has been imposed on it by God and which He revealed to us in the language of mathematics.”

— Johannes Kepler

3. “I much prefer the sharpest criticism of a single intelligent man to the thoughtless approval of the masses.”

— Johannes Kepler

4. “Since we astronomers are priests of the highest God in regard to the book of nature, it befits us to be thoughtful, not of the glory of our minds, but rather, above all else, of the glory of God.”

— Johannes Kepler

5. “Geometry is one and eternal shining in the mind of God.”

— Johannes Kepler

6. “Nature loves simplicity and unity.”

— Johannes Kepler

7. “When ships to sail the void between the stars have been built, there will step forth men to sail these ships.”

— Johannes Kepler

8. “Why are things as they are and not otherwise?”

— Johannes Kepler

9. “The diversity of the phenomena of nature is so great, and the treasures hidden in the heavens so rich, precisely in order that the human mind shall never be lacking in fresh nourishment.”

— Johannes Kepler

10. “Without proper experiments I conclude nothing.”

— Johannes Kepler

11. “Geometry is the archetype of the beauty of the world.”

— Johannes Kepler

12. “Truth is the daughter of time, and I feel no shame in being her midwife.”

— Johannes Kepler

13. “Geometry is one and eternal shining in the mind of God. That share in it accorded to men is one of the reasons that Man is the image of God.”

— Johannes Kepler

14. “Eyesight should learn from reason.”

— Johannes Kepler

15. “Where there is matter, there is geometry.”

— Johannes Kepler

16. “Nature uses as little as possible of anything.”

— Johannes Kepler

17. “I believe only and alone in the service of Jesus Christ. In him is all refuge and solace.”

— Johannes Kepler

18. “My greatest desire is that I may perceive the God whom I find everywhere in the external world, in like manner also within and inside myself.”

— Johannes Kepler

19. “We find, therefore, under this orderly arrangement, a wonderful symmetry in the universe, and a definite relation of harmony in the motion and magnitude of the orbs, of a kind that is not possible to obtain in any other way.”

— Johannes Kepler

20. “O telescope, instrument of knowledge, more precious than any sceptre.”

— Johannes Kepler

21. “We do not ask for what useful purpose the birds do sing, for song is their pleasure since they were created for singing. Similarly, we ought not to ask why the human mind troubles to fathom the secrets of the heavens...”

— Johannes Kepler

22. “If God himself has waited six thousand years for someone to contemplate his works, my book can wait for a hundred.”

— Johannes Kepler

23. “It may be well to wait a century for a reader, as God has waited six thousand years for an observer.”

— Johannes Kepler

24. “The roads by which men arrive at their insights into celestial matters seem to me almost as worthy of wonder as those matters in themselves.”

— Johannes Kepler

25. “So long as the mother, Ignorance, lives, it is not safe for Science the offspring, to divulge the hidden causes of things.”

— Johannes Kepler

26. “Do we ask what profit the little bird hopes for in singing?”

— Johannes Kepler

27. “If there is anything that can bind the heavenly mind of man to this dreary exile of our earthly home and can reconcile us with our fate so that one can enjoy living,-then it is verily the enjoyment of the mathematical sciences and astronomy.”

— Johannes Kepler

28. “When things are in order, if the cause of the orderliness cannot be deduced from the motion of the elements or from the composition of matter, it is quite possibly a cause possessing a mind.”

— Johannes Kepler

29. “The Earth is round, and is inhabited on all sides, is insignificantly small, and is borne through the stars.”

— Johannes Kepler

30. “Planets move in ellipses with the Sun at one focus.”

— Johannes Kepler

31. “The radius vector describes equal areas in equal times.”

— Johannes Kepler

32. “In theology we must consider the predominance of authority; in philosophy the predominance of reason.”

— Johannes Kepler

33. “The treasures hidden in the heavens are so rich that the human mind shall never be lacking in fresh nourishment.”

— Johannes Kepler

34. “If the earth were not round, heavy bodies would not tend from every side in a straight line towards the center of the earth, but to different points from different sides.”

— Johannes Kepler

35. “If my false figures came near to the facts, this happened merely by chance... These comments are not worth printing. Yet it gives me pleasure to remember how many detours I had to make, along how many walls I had to grope in the darkness of my ignorance until I found the door which lets in the light of truth... In such manner did I dream of the truth.”

— Johannes Kepler

36. “Ships and sails proper for the heavenly air should be fashioned. Then there will also be people, who do not shrink from the dreary vastness of space.”

— Johannes Kepler

37. “Once miracles are admitted, every scientific explanation is out of the question.”

— Johannes Kepler

38. “Thus God himself was too kind to remain idle and began to play the game of signatures signing his likeness unto the world: therefore I chance to think that all nature and the graceful sky are symbolized in the art of Geometria.”

— Johannes Kepler

39. “God gives every animal the means of saving its life-why object if he gives astrology to the astronomer?”

— Johannes Kepler

40. “Discover the force of the skies O Men: once recognised it can be put to use.”

— Johannes Kepler

41. “I used to measure the Heavens, now I measure the shadows of Earth. The mind belonged to Heaven, the body’s shadow lies here.”

— Johannes Kepler

42. “The soul of the newly born baby is marked for life by the pattern of the stars at the moment it comes into the world, unconsciously remembers it, and remains sensitive to the return of configurations of a similar kind.”

— Johannes Kepler

43. “I believe the geometric proportion served the creator as an idea when He introduced the continuous generation of similar objects from similar objects.”

— Johannes Kepler

44. “Now, as God the maker play’d he taught the game to Nature whom he created in his image; taught her the selfsame game which he played to her.”

— Johannes Kepler

45. “I am a Lutheran astrologer, I throw away the nonsense and keep the hard kernel.”

— Johannes Kepler

46. “Just as the eye was made to see colours, and the ear to hear sounds, so the human mind was made to understand, not whatever you please, but quantity.”

— Johannes Kepler

47. “Yet in this my stars were not Mercury as morning star in the angle of the seventh house, in quartile with Mars, but they were Copernicus, they were Tycho Brahe, without whose books of observations everything which has now been brought by me into the brightest daylight would lie buried in darkness.”

— Johannes Kepler

48. “If the earth should cease to attract its waters to itself all the waters of the sea would be raised and would flow to the body of the moon.”

— Johannes Kepler

49. “The Creator, the fountain of all wisdom, the approver of perpetual order, the eternal and superessential spring of geometry and harmonics.”

— Johannes Kepler

50. “Repudiating the sensible world, which he neither sees himself nor believes from those who have, the Peripatetic joins combat by childish quibbling in a world on paper, and denies the Sun shines because he himself is blind.”

— Johannes Kepler