Galileo Galilei Quotes

Whatsoever is contrary to nature is contrary to reason, and whatsoever is contrary to reason is absurd.

A man walking through a wall is a miracle. A man both walking and not walking through a wall at the same time and in the same respect is a contradiction. God can perform miracles but not contradictions - not because his power is limited, but because contradictions are meaningless.

Yet nature cannot be contravened, but preserves a fixed and immutable order.

A tautology's truth is certain, a proposition's possible, a contradiction's impossible.

It is the function of science to discover the existence of a general reign of order in nature and to find the causes governing this order. And this refers in equal measure to the relations of man - social and political - and to the entire universe as a whole.

Nature is the source of all true knowledge. She has her own logic, her own laws, she has no effect without cause nor invention without necessity.

There are in nature neither rewards nor punishments — there are only consequences.

It is not true that equality is a law of nature. Nature has made nothing equal; her sovereign law is subordination and dependence.

Nothing which implies contradiction falls under the omnipotence of God.

Simply follow nature, Rousseau declares. Sade, laughing grimly, agrees.

Everything in nature goes by law, and not by luck.

Why should a man have any apprehension about the change and dissolution of all the elements? For it is according to nature, and nothing is evil which is according to nature.

Nature even in chaos cannot proceed otherwise than regularly and according to order.

Nature does not make mistakes. Right and wrong are human categories.

There is a higher law affecting our relation to pines as well as to men. A pine cut down, a dead pine, is no more a pine than a dead human carcass is a man.

What is not in nature can never be true.

It seems evident that everything which exists in nature, is natural, no matter how simple or complicated a phenomenon it is; and on no occasion can the so-called 'supernatural' be anything else than a completely natural law, though it may, at the moment, be above and beyond the present understanding.

It does not make sense. It cannot exist. It's impossible, and if it isn't impossible, it's irrelevant, and if it isn't either of those things, it's embarrassing.

We must proceed with a full realization that no statute enacted by man can repeal the inexorable laws of nature.

The impossible could not have happened, therefore the impossible must be possible in spite of appearances.

Nature hath no goal though she hath law.

Nature . . . is inexorable and immutable; she never transgresses the laws imposed upon her, nor cares a whit whether her abstruse reasons and methods of operations are understandable to men.

Nature is constrained by the cause of her laws which dwell inborn in her. Variant: Nature is constrained by the order of her own law which lives and works within her.

The impossible is more believable than the highly improbable.

And nature must obey necessity.