Galileo Galilei Quotes (39 Quotes)

We cannot teach people anything; we can only help them discover it within themselves.

I've loved the stars too fondly to be fearful of the night.

I do not feel obliged to believe that the same God who has endowed us with sense, reason, and intellect has intended us to forgo their use.

Having been admonished by this Holy Office the Inquisition entirely to abandon the false opinion that the Sun was the center of the universe and immovable, and that the Earth was not the center of the same and that it moved... I abjure with a since

It has always seemed to me extreme presumptuousness on the part of those who want to make human ability the measure of what nature can and knows how to do, since, when one comes down to it, there is not one effect in nature, no matter how small, that even the most speculative minds can fully understand.

Where the senses fail us, reason must step in.

And who can doubt that it will lead to the worst disorders when minds created free by God are compelled to submit slavishly to an outside will When we are told to deny our senses and subject them to the whim of others When people devoid of whatsoever competence are made judges over experts and are granted authority to treat them as they please These are the novelties which are apt to bring about the ruin of commonwealths and the subversion of the state. On the margin of his own copy of Dialogue on the Great World Systems.

Measure what is measurable, and make measurable what is not so.

But of all other stupendous inventions, what sublimity of mind must have been his who conceived how to communicate his most secret thoughts to any other person, though very far distant, either in time or place And with no greater difficulty than the various arrangement of two dozen little signs upon paper Let this be the seal of all the admirable inventions of man.

It is surely harmful to souls to make it a heresy to believe what is proved.

So far as I know, no one has yet pointed out that the distance travelled in equal intervals of time, by a body falling from rest, stand to one another in the same ratio as the odd number beginning with 1'.

Nature is relentless and unchangeable, and it is indifferent as to whether its hidden reasons and actions are understandable to man or not.

I wish, my dear Kepler, that we could have a good laugh together at the extraordinary stupidity of the mob. What do you think of the foremost philosophers of this University In spite of my oft-repeated efforts and invitations, they have refused, wit

But it does move.

You cannot teach a man anything you can only help him to find it within himself.

The difficulties in the study of the infinite arise because we attempt, with our finite minds, to discuss the infinite, assigning to it those properties which we give to the finite and limited but this ... is wrong, for we cannot speak of infinite q

All truths are easy to understand once they are discovered; the point is to discover them.

We must say that there are as many squares as there are numbers.

Facts which at first seem improbable will, even on scant explanation, drop the cloak which has hidden them and stand forth in naked and simple beauty.

To command the professors of astronomy to confute their own observations is to enjoin an impossibility, for it is to command them not to see what they do see, and not to understand what they do understand, and to find what they do not discover.

Spots are on the surface of the solar body where they are produced and also dissolved, some in shorter and others in longer periods. They are carried around the Sun an important occurrence in itself.

The Milky Way is nothing else but a mass of innumerable stars planted together in clusters.

If I were again beginning my studies, I would follow the advice of Plato and start with mathematics.

In questions of science, the authority of a thousand is not worth the humble reasoning of a single individual.

I think that in the discussion of natural problems we ought to begin not with the Scriptures, but with experiments, and demonstrations.

The Divine intellect indeed knows infinitely more propositions than we can ever know. But with regard to those few which the human intellect does understand, I believe that its knowledge equals the Divine in objective certainty.

It vexes me when they would constrain science by the authority of the Scriptures, and yet do not consider themselves bound to answer reason and experiment.

I mentally conceive of some movable projected on a horizontal plane all impediments being put aside. Now it is evident ... that the equable motion on this plane would be perpetual if the plane were of infinite extent but if we assume it to be ended,

And yet it moves.

Among the great men who have philosophized about the action of the tides, the one who surprised me most is Kepler. He was a person of independent genius, but he became interested in the action of the moon on the water, and in other occult phenome.

By denying scientific principles, one may maintain any paradox.

The Bible shows the way to go to heaven, not the way the heavens go.

The universe cannot be read until we have learnt the language and become familiar with the characters in which it is written. It is written in mathematical language, and the letters are triangles, circles and other geometrical figures, without which means it is humanly impossible to comprehend a single word. Opere Il Saggiatore p. 171.

The sun, with all those planets revolving around it and dependent on it, can still ripen a bunch of grapes as if it had nothing else in the universe to do.

They know that it is human nature to take up causes whereby a man may oppress his neighbor, no matter how unjustly... Hence they have had no trouble in finding men who would preach the damnability and heresy of the new doctrine from the very pulpit..

I abjure with a sincere heart and unfeigned faith, I curse and detest the said errors and heresies, and generally all and every error and sect contrary to the Holy Catholic Church

It is very pious to say and prudent to affirm that the holy Bible can never speak untruth -- whenever its true meaning is understood. But I believe nobody will deny that it is often very abstruse, and may say things which are quite different from wha

Philosophy is written in that great book which ever lies before our eyes ... We cannot understand it if we do not first learn the language and grasp the symbols in which it is written. The book is written in the mathematical language ... without whos

I have never met a man so ignorant that I couldn't learn something from him.