Astronomer Quotes

An undevout astronomer is mad.

By the time I finished high school, I knew I wanted to become an astronomer. By the time I finished college, I knew I wanted to be part of the American space program. And that's exactly what I did.

Note to academics: Aristarchus' track record of astronomical research would probably have guaranteed him tenure somewhere, if tenure had been invented. His stack of reprints included measuring the distances of the Moon and Sun.

So great was the preference given to sacred over profane learning that Christianity had been in existence fifteen hundred years, and had not produced a single astronomer.

After decades of hauling telescopes around in the back of vans and going up to high altitude locations and so forth, I did finally build an observatory, here on Sonoma mountain.

The body is extremely important to me, because it is a planet. For instance, if you compare Earth and an astronomer, you will see that the man is a planet.

Just because a man glances up at the sky at night does not make him an astronomer, you know.

I don't think I'm as revolutionary as Galileo, but I don't think I'm not as revolutionary as Galileo.

When I first went to Hubble, as an astronomer and as a scientist, it was a dream come true. And as an astronaut, the Hubble missions are premiere missions because Hubble is so important to science, so important to humanity, that it's just a very special event. But as an astronomer, it was sort of the holy grail of missions.

Alas! Your dear friend and servant Galileo has been for the last month hopelessly blind; so that this heaven, this earth, this universe, which I by my marvelous discoveries and clear demonstrations had enlarged a hundred thousand times beyond the belief of the wise men of bygone ages, henceforward for me is shrunk into such a small space as is filled by my own bodily sensations.

The undevout astronomer must be mad.

As the astronomer rejoices in new knowledge which compels him to give up the dignity of our globe as the centre, the pride, and even the final cause of the universe, so do those who have escaped from the Christian mythology enjoy their release from the superstition which fails to make them happy, fails to make them good, fails to make them wise, and has become as great an obstacle in the way of progress as the prior mythologies which it took the place of two thousand years ago.

My biggest love is still planets and stars. If I hadn't become an artist, I'd be an astronomer because I still love it so much.

When I was little, I wanted to be an astronomer, but that didn't happen.

I felt obligated to change music to art, the same way that Galileo proved the Earth was round to the world and that the Sun did not stand still.

Very few astronomers will be mourned with the same degree of love and admiration as Vera Rubin.

When I was in my teens, Yehudi Menuhin, who was at work on his project 'The Music of Man,' introduced me to the great astronomer Carl Sagan. It was Sagan who first opened my eyes to the magnitude of the universe, and essentially to the notion of 'music of the spheres.'

My parents gave me a small telescope, then I built my own, and one thing led to another. So that's how I ended up going from being a hobby astronomer to a professional astronomer.

What is sudden for one person may not be sudden at all for another; eclipses of the sun occur “suddenly” for the ignorant but by no means for the astronomer. The same thing applies to revolutions: those political “catastrophes” happen “suddenly” for the ignorant and, the great majority of self-satisfied philistines, but very often they are by no means sudden for the man who understands the social phenomena surrounding him.

'Carl Sagan: A Life,' though a riveting tale, tells as much about the all-too-human feelings of jealousy and resentment as it does about the individual who inspired them.

No one working as an astronomer is shackled in chains. This is a tremendous profession. There are lots of neat people, and you get to do cool things. If I had to say something negative, it's that there's often a whole lot of travel that takes me away from my children. That can be a bummer a lot of times.

The dark areas, the 'mare' plains of the moon, are so incredibly smooth that the English astronomer Thomas Gold has suggested that they might really be depressions filled to the brim with dust. A rocket hit would show whether they are that or not.

I have just gone over my comet computations again, and it is humiliating to perceive how very little more I know than I did seven years ago when I first did this kind of work.