“Science is the process of thinking God’s thoughts after Him.”
— Johannes Kepler
“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.”
“Geometry is one and eternal shining in the mind of God.”
“Nature loves simplicity and unity.”
“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.”
“I much prefer the sharpest criticism of a single intelligent man to the thoughtless approval of the masses.”
“When ships to sail the void between the stars have been built, there will step forth men to sail these ships.”
“Truth is the daughter of time, and I feel no shame in being her midwife.”
“Why are things as they are and not otherwise?”
“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.”
“Without proper experiments I conclude nothing.”
“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.”
“Eyesight should learn from reason.”
“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.”
“I believe only and alone in the service of Jesus Christ. In him is all refuge and solace.”
“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...”
“If God himself has waited six thousand years for someone to contemplate his works, my book can wait for a hundred.”
“Nature uses as little as possible of anything.”
“It may be well to wait a century for a reader, as God has waited six thousand years for an observer.”
“Where there is matter, there is geometry.”
“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.”
“O telescope, instrument of knowledge, more precious than any sceptre.”
“Geometry is the archetype of the beauty of the world.”
“So long as the mother, Ignorance, lives, it is not safe for Science the offspring, to divulge the hidden causes of things.”
“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.”
“The Earth is round, and is inhabited on all sides, is insignificantly small, and is borne through the stars.”
“Planets move in ellipses with the Sun at one focus.”
“The radius vector describes equal areas in equal times.”
“In theology we must consider the predominance of authority; in philosophy the predominance of reason.”
“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.”
“Once miracles are admitted, every scientific explanation is out of the question.”
“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.”
“God gives every animal the means of saving its life-why object if he gives astrology to the astronomer?”
“Do we ask what profit the little bird hopes for in singing?”
“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.”
“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.”
“I believe the geometric proportion served the creator as an idea when He introduced the continuous generation of similar objects from similar objects.”
“I used to measure the Heavens, now I measure the shadows of Earth. The mind belonged to Heaven, the body’s shadow lies here.”
“Discover the force of the skies O Men: once recognised it can be put to use.”
“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.”
“I am a Lutheran astrologer, I throw away the nonsense and keep the hard kernel.”
“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.”
“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.”
“The Creator, the fountain of all wisdom, the approver of perpetual order, the eternal and superessential spring of geometry and harmonics.”
“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.”
“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.”
“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.”
“I also ask you my friends not to condemn me entirely to the mill of mathematical calculations, and allow me time for philosophical speculations, my only pleasures.”
“The sphere of the attractive virtue which is in the moon extends as far as the earth, and entices up the waters; but as the moon flies rapidly across the zenith, and the waters cannot follow so quickly, a flow of the ocean is occasioned in the torrid zone towards the westward.”
“Astronomy would not provide me with bread if men did not entertain hopes of reading the future in the heavens.”
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