"Copernicus" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... created. We shall commence with Ptolemy, who, after the foundations of the science had been laid by Hipparchus, gave to astronomy the form in which it was taught throughout the Middle Ages. We shall next see the mighty revolution in our conceptions of the universe which are associated with the name of Copernicus. We then pass to those periods illumined by the genius of Galileo and Newton, and afterwards we shall trace the careers of other more recent discoverers, by whose industry and genius the boundaries of human knowledge ...
— Great Astronomers • R. S. Ball
... be sure. A problem for Copernicus—a paradox, a theorem with many decimal points. So thinks the tourist, retiring to his hotel. And figuring thus, he falls to sleep, enveloped in a caressing ...
— Europe After 8:15 • H. L. Mencken, George Jean Nathan and Willard Huntington Wright
... pretend that printing is so great a discovery as writing, or algebra, or language. What are the most brilliant of our chemical discoveries compared with the invention of fire and the metals?' Hipparchus ranks with the Keplers and Newtons; and Copernicus was but the champion of Pythagoras. To say nothing of the characteristic assumption that somebody 'discovered' language and fire in the same sense as modern chemists discovered spectrum analysis, the argument is substantially that, because Hipparchus was as great a genius ...
— Hours in a Library - New Edition, with Additions. Vol. II (of 3) • Leslie Stephen
... worlds has impressed my imagination with anything but discomfort and terror. The Ptolemaic scheme was better suited to human needs. Our religious sense demands not only order but significance; a world not merely great, but relevant to our destinies. Copernicus, it is true, gave us liberty and space; but he bereft us of security and intimacy. And I thought of the great vision of Dante, so terrible and yet so beautiful, so human through and through,—that vision which, if it contracts space, expands the fate of man, and relates him to the sun ...
— Appearances - Being Notes of Travel • Goldsworthy Lowes Dickinson
... literature includes the highly illustrious mathematician and astronomer Ptolemy, whose system obtained respect and belief until the advent of Copernicus; the physician Galen; the philosopher-physician Sextus Empiricus, who was a good historian, highly sceptical, but well informed ...
— Initiation into Literature • Emile Faguet
... conflict took place rather more than 300 years ago at the opening of the Modern Era of astronomy. It was a conflict between two schools of science—between the disciples of Aristotle and Claudius Ptolemy on the one hand and the disciples of Copernicus on the other. It has often been represented as a conflict between religion and science, whereas that which happened was that the representatives of the older school of science made use of the powers of the Church to persecute the newer school as represented by Galileo. ...
— The Astronomy of the Bible - An Elementary Commentary on the Astronomical References - of Holy Scripture • E. Walter Maunder
... let that break our rest; Little we cared if Mars o'erhead Were or were not inhabited; Without the aid of Saturn's rings Fair girls were wived in those far springs; Warm lips met ours and conquered us Or ere thou wert, Copernicus! ...
— The Sisters' Tragedy • Thomas Bailey Aldrich
... one of the supreme spectacles of the moon, the immense ring or crater mountain Copernicus. This is generally regarded as the grandest object that the telescope reveals on the earth's satellite. It is about fifty-six miles across, and its interior falls to a depth of 8,000 feet below the Mare Imbrium. Its broad wall, composed of circle within circle of ridges, terraces, and precipices, ...
— Pleasures of the telescope • Garrett Serviss
... Descartes were soldiers. Andrew Johnson was a tailor. Cardinal Wolsey, Defoe, and Kirke White were butchers' sons. Faraday was the son of a blacksmith, and his teacher, Humphry Davy, was an apprentice to an apothecary. Kepler was a waiter boy in a German hotel, Bunyan a tinker, Copernicus the son of a Polish baker. The boy Herschel played the oboe for his meals. Marshal Ney, the "bravest of the brave," rose from the ranks. His great industry gained for him the name of "The Indefatigable." ...
— Architects of Fate - or, Steps to Success and Power • Orison Swett Marden
... but this modest employment did not occupy him sufficiently, and he gathered round him a few gentlemen of the district, to whom he taught the science of the Sphere. Bruno also wrote a book upon the Sphere, which was lost. He expounded the system of Copernicus, and talked to his pupils with enthusiasm about the movement of the earth and of the ...
— The Heroic Enthusiasts,(1 of 2) (Gli Eroici Furori) - An Ethical Poem • Giordano Bruno
... before Copernicus, the conception of the "universe" was defensible on scientific grounds: the diurnal revolution of the heavenly bodies bound them together as all parts of one system, of which the earth was the centre. Round this apparent scientific fact, many human desires rallied: ...
— Mysticism and Logic and Other Essays • Bertrand Russell
... was man, your theologians and your philosophers reason like the multiped of Versailles or the Tuileries, who believe the humidity of the cellars is made for their special use and that the remainder of the castle is uninhabitable. The system of the world, as Canon Copernicus taught in the last century, following the doctrines of Aristarchus of Samos and Pythagorean philosophers, is doubtless known to you, as there have actually been prepared some compendiums of them for the urchins of village schools and dialogues ...
— The Queen Pedauque • Anatole France
... the one to make such a suggestion. Cusanus, however, was very much interested in mathematics and in the natural sciences, and we have many wonderful suggestions from his pen. He was the first, for instance, to suggest, more than a century before Copernicus, that the earth was not the centre of the universe, and that it would not be absolutely at rest or, as he said, devoid of all motion. His words are: "Terra igitur, quae centrum esse nequit, motu omni carere ...
— Old-Time Makers of Medicine • James J. Walsh
... products of supernatural agency. From this point of view religion is no more than a primitive science. It is the first stage of that long series of generalisations which, beginning with crude animism, ends with the discoveries of a Copernicus, a Newton, a Darwin, or a Spencer. It is a history that begins with vitalism and ends with mechanism. We commence with a world in which there exists a chaotic assemblage of independent personal forces, and end with a universe that is self-acting, self-adjusting, ...
— Religion & Sex - Studies in the Pathology of Religious Development • Chapman Cohen
... in consequence of new observations, I call that movement of the mind REVOLUTION. If the ideas are simply extended or modified, there is only PROGRESS. Thus the system of Ptolemy was a step in astronomical progress, that of Copernicus was a revolution. So, in 1789, there was struggle and progress; revolution there was none. An examination of the reforms ...
— What is Property? - An Inquiry into the Principle of Right and of Government • P. J. Proudhon
... India is so blended with the religion of the people, as far as Hindoos are concerned, that we cannot make progress without exciting alarm. Had a nation, endowed with all the knowledge we have, come into Europe in the days of Galileo and Copernicus, and attempted to impart it to the mass of the people, or to the higher classes only, the same alarm would have been raised, or nearly the same. We must be content with small, or slow progress; but there ...
— A Journey through the Kingdom of Oude, Volumes I & II • William Sleeman
... and compromises with the Zeitgeist. Thus the morality of chivalry and war, the ideals of foppishness and honour, have been long maintained side by side with the maxims of the gospel, which they entirely contradict. Later the system of Copernicus, incompatible at heart with the anthropocentric and moralistic view of the world which Christianity implies, was accepted by the church with some lame attempt to render it innocuous; but it remains an alien and hostile element, like a spent bullet lodged in the flesh. In more recent ...
— Winds Of Doctrine - Studies in Contemporary Opinion • George Santayana
... of the moon, the earth's daily axial revolution, the presence of fixed stars in the Milky Way, the law of gravitation, and other scientific facts which did not dawn in the Western world until the time of Copernicus and Newton." ...
— Autobiography of a YOGI • Paramhansa Yogananda
... Queene' could scarcely seem incredible to an age where incredulity was almost unknown because it was impossible to set a bound how far any one might reasonably believe. But the horizon of man's expanded knowledge was not to be limited even to his own earth. About the year 1540, the Polish Copernicus opened a still grander realm of speculation (not to be adequately possessed for several centuries) by the announcement that our world is not the center of the universe, but merely one of the satellites of ...
— A History of English Literature • Robert Huntington Fletcher
... in a straight line unless it be stopped or deflected. Studying the sky through his newly invented telescope, he beheld the sun spots and noted the sun's revolution on its axis, the phases of Venus, and the satellites of Jupiter. These discoveries seemed to confirm the ideas advanced long before by Copernicus—the earth was not the center of the universe and the heavens were not perfect and unchanging. He dared to discuss these matters in the language of the people and was, as everyone ...
— The Mind in the Making - The Relation of Intelligence to Social Reform • James Harvey Robinson
... who watched the ruin of the old world; of the bishop of Hippo dying when his city was about to fall before the onslaught of the Vandals; of the monks who, in a Europe peopled with wolves, worked as illuminators, builders, musicians. Let us think of Dante, Copernicus, and Savonarola; of exiles, persecutions, burnings at the stake; of Spinoza, frail in health, writing his immortal Ethics by the light of the burning villages of his invaded country. Let us think of our own Michel de Montaigne, ...
— The Forerunners • Romain Rolland
... high even as a natural philosopher or physicist in his own age: he seems to have refused credence to the discoveries of Copernicus and Galileo, which had stirred the scientific world into great activity before his day; and his investigations in botany and vegetable physiology are crude ...
— English Literature, Considered as an Interpreter of English History - Designed as a Manual of Instruction • Henry Coppee
... and took her position at the instrument. Saint Simeon Stylites the Younger explained the wonders of the moon to her,—Tycho and the grooves radiating from it, Kepler and Copernicus with their craters and ridges, and all the most brilliant shows of this wonderful little world. I thought he was more diffuse and more enthusiastic in his descriptions than he had been with the older members of the party. I don't doubt the old gentleman who lived so long on ...
— The Poet at the Breakfast Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.
... college, it is admission as a student. For a corporation, it is admission as an employee. In each case we present the qualifications of the following at college age: Thomas Edison, Michael Faraday, Nicholai Tesla, James Watt, Heinrich Hertz, Kepler, Copernicus, Galileo, and Henry Ford. The admissibility of this group of the world's scientific and the inventive leaders is shown here." Baker pointed to a minute dab of ...
— The Great Gray Plague • Raymond F. Jones
... time the one precedes the other. They hold that the sun approaches nearer and nearer, and therefore by ever-lessening circles reaches the tropics and the equator every year a little sooner. They measure months by the course of the moon, years by that of the sun. They praise Ptolemy, admire Copernicus, but place Aristarchus and Philolaus before him. They take great pains in endeavouring to understand the construction of the world, and whether or not it will perish, and at what time. They believe that the true oracle of Jesus Christ is by the signs in the sun, in the moon, and in the stars, ...
— Ideal Commonwealths • Various
... from traditions and authoritative decretals; paths which neither priest nor king could close, for they followed the stars in their courses. The waymarks had been blazed by the genius of Galileo and Copernicus. Those who dared to venture into this new territory found institutions and systems of theology arrayed against them, armed with the power of present persecution, more to be feared than threats of future damnation. Public life was venal, the Church simoniacal, and society licentious. In such ...
— Great Men and Famous Women, Vol. 7 of 8 • Charles F. (Charles Francis) Horne
... Inquisition to his labours, but in 1632 he published his immortal work Dialogo sopra i due Massimi Sistemi del monda, Tolemaico et Copernicano (Florence), which was the cause of his undoing. In this book he defended the opinion of Copernicus concerning the motion of the earth round the sun, which was supposed by the theologians of the day to be an opinion opposed to the teaching of Holy Scripture and subversive of all truth. The work was brought before the Inquisition at Rome, and condemned by the order ...
— Books Fatal to Their Authors • P. H. Ditchfield |
