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

— Johannes Kepler

4. “Nature loves simplicity and unity.”

— Johannes Kepler

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

— Johannes Kepler

6. “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

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

— Johannes Kepler

9. “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

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

— Johannes Kepler

11. “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

12. “Without proper experiments I conclude nothing.”

— Johannes Kepler

13. “Eyesight should learn from reason.”

— Johannes Kepler

14. “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

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

— Johannes Kepler

16. “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

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

— Johannes Kepler

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

— Johannes Kepler

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

— Johannes Kepler

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

— Johannes Kepler

21. “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

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

— Johannes Kepler

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

— Johannes Kepler

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

— Johannes Kepler

25. “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

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

— Johannes Kepler

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

— Johannes Kepler

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

— Johannes Kepler

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

— Johannes Kepler

30. “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

31. “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

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

— Johannes Kepler

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

— Johannes Kepler

34. “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

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

— Johannes Kepler

36. “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

37. “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

38. “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

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

— Johannes Kepler

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

— Johannes Kepler

41. “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

42. “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

43. “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

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

— Johannes Kepler

45. “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

46. “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

47. “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.”

— Johannes Kepler

48. “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

49. “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.”

— Johannes Kepler

50. “Astronomy would not provide me with bread if men did not entertain hopes of reading the future in the heavens.”

— Johannes Kepler