Galileo Galilei
"After the laws of Physics, everything else is just opinion"
Neil deGrasse Tyson
"The Cosmos is all that is or ever was or ever will be. Our feeblest contemplations of the Cosmos stir us - there is a tingling in the spine, a catch in the voice, a faint sensation, as if a distant memory, of falling from a height. We know we are approaching the greatest of mysteries."
Carl Sagan
"Space isn't remote at all. It's only an hour's drive away if your car could go straight upwards."
Fred Hoyle
"Sometimes I think we're alone in the universe, and sometimes I think we're not. In either case the idea is quite staggering."
Arthur C. Clarke
"For a moment of night we have a glimpse of ourselves and of our world islanded in its stream of stars— pilgrims of mortality, voyaging between horizons across eternal seas of space and time."
Henry Beston
"Considered as a collector of rare and precious things, the amateur astronomer has a great advantage over amateurs in other fields ... the amateur astronomer has access at all times to the original objects of his study; the masterworks of the heavens belong to him as much as to the great observatories of the world. And there is no privilege like that of being allowed to stand in the presence of the original."
Robert Burnham Jr
It is not knowledge, but the act of learning, not possession but the act of getting there, which grants the greatest enjoyment.
Carl F. Gauss
Amateur astronomy is not just a hobby, it is a commitment, a way of life
that transcends the detail of daily existence. Look through your telescope
thoughtfully tonight, for it is more than starlight that its mirror will
reflect. From the unknown dimensions of space and time will return also
a part of yourself.
David H. Levy
The appeal of astronomy is both intellectual and aesthetic, it combines the thrill
of exploration and discovery, the fun of sight-seeing, and the sheer pleasure of
firsthand acquaintance with incredibly wonderful and beautiful things. But it
also offers the privilege, not to be taken lightly, of adding something
to the knowledge and understanding of man.
Robert Burnham Jr.
The most beautiful thing we can experience is the mysterious. It is the source of all true art and all science.
He to whom this emotion is a stranger, who can no longer pause to wonder and stand rapt in awe, is as good as
dead: his eyes are closed.
Albert Einstein
The universe is like a safe to which there is a combination. But the combination is locked up in the safe.
Peter de Vries
An undevout astronomer is mad.
Edward Young
Astronomy compels the soul to look upwards and leads us from this world to another.
Plato
"Not only is the universe stranger than we imagine, it is stranger than we can imagine."
Arthur Stanley Eddington
"Men and women are not content
to comfort themselves with tales of gods and giants, or to confine their thoughts to the
daily affairs of life, they also build telescopes and satellites and accelerators,
and sit at their desks for endless hours working out the meaning of the data they
gather. The effort to understand the universe is one of the very few things that
lifts human life a little above the level of farce, and gives it some of
the grace of tragedy."
Steven Weinberg
"The theory is when all is known but nothing works. The practice
is when everything works, but no one knows why."
Albert Einstein
"The observation is the investigation of a natural phenomenon, and the experiment
is the investigation of a phenomenon modified by the investigator.”
Claude Bernard
"I can calculate the movement of the heavy bodies, but not the madness of crowd."
Isaac Newton
"Astronomy is a hardly accessible science, which supposes an intelligence
familiarized with the most recent discoveries in Physics, Chemistry and
Mechanics; but is this a sufficient reason to be unaware all our life
about its lessons, laws and conclusions?"
Chanoine Théophile Moreux
"Science is a wonderful thing if one does not have to earn one's living at it."
Albert Einstein
"You don't have to be cleverer than other people, you just have to be one day earlier."
Leo Szilard
"The earth is simply too small and fragile a basket for the human race to keep all its eggs in."
Arthur C. Clarke
"In questions of science, the authority of a thousand is not worth the humble reasoning of a single individual."
Galileo Galilei
"Two possibilities exist: either we are alone in the Universe or we are not. Both are equally terrifying."
Arthur C.Clarke
"Imagination will often carry us to worlds that never were. But without it we go nowhere."
Carl Sagan
"The sky is the daily bread of the eyes."
Raplh Waldo Emerson
"The treasures hidden in the heavens are so rich that the human mind shall never be lacking in fresh nourishment."
Johannes Kepler
"The more the universe seems comprehensible, the more it also seems pointless."
Steven Weinberg
" This sight... is by far the noblest astronomy affords."
Edmund Halley
"No known roof is as beautiful as the skies above."
Michael O'Muircheartaigh
"Astronomy is perhaps the science whose discoveries owe least
to chance, in which human understanding appears in its whole magnitude,
and through which man can best learn how small he is. "
Georg C. Lichtenberg
"Astronomers, like burglars and jazz musicians, operate best at night."
Miles Kington
"Astronomy, Benjamin mused, was a lot like a detective story
with clues revealed first, and the actual body only later - if ever."
Gregory (Albert) Benford
"Two things are infinite: the universe and human stupidity; and I'm not sure about the universe."
Asteroids with computed orbits
My discoveries total:
336