"Copernicus" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... epicycles and eccentrics. Only by the aid of this hypothesis, equally untrue, but capable of accounting more nearly for the appearances, and so of inducing more accurate observations—only thus did it become possible for Copernicus to show that the heliocentric theory is more feasible than the geocentric theory; or for Kepler to show that the planets move round the sun in ellipses. Yet again, without the aid of Kepler's more advanced theory ...
— Essays: Scientific, Political, & Speculative, Vol. I • Herbert Spencer
... it contradict every thing you said to-day. Ah, then, exclaim the aged ladies, you shall be sure to be misunderstood! Misunderstood! It is a right fool's word. Is it so bad then to be misunderstood? Pythagoras was misunderstood, and Socrates, and Jesus, and Luther, and Copernicus, and Galileo, and Newton, and every pure and wise spirit that ever took flesh. To be ...
— English Prose - A Series of Related Essays for the Discussion and Practice • Frederick William Roe (edit. and select.)
... ago, when astrologers first began to see that their occupation was passing from them, the Wise Men of the East were appealed to against the enemies of astrology,[2]—very much as Moses was appealed to against Copernicus and Galileo, and more recently to protect us against certain relationships which Darwin, Wallace, and Huxley unkindly indicate for the human ...
— Myths and Marvels of Astronomy • Richard A. Proctor
... to draw a chart of her interior machinery, as she supposes it to be. It would bear as little resemblance to the reality as did the charts of the ancients who antedated Tycho Brahe, Pythagoras, and Copernicus, to the celestial charts of the nineteenth century. One would note especially the prominence given to certain organs. The stomach is almost, if not entirely, ignored. It is a matter for speculation why this valuable factor of the human ...
— The Secret of a Happy Home (1896) • Marion Harland
... the main reasons which led Columbus to undertake his momentous voyage; and his thorough acquaintance with the astronomical science of that day was, in his own judgment, what enabled him to overcome the almost innumerable obstacles which attended its prosecution.[A] In return, I find that Copernicus in the very commencement of his immortal work De Revolutionibus Orbium Coelestium, fol. 2, appeals to the discovery of America as completing the demonstration of the sphericity of the earth. Much of our knowledge ...
— The Uses of Astronomy - An Oration Delivered at Albany on the 28th of July, 1856 • Edward Everett
... who have given the greatest impulse to the sublime science of astronomy, we find Copernicus, the son of a Polish baker; Kepler, the son of a German public-house keeper, and himself the "garcon de cabaret;" d'Alembert, a foundling picked up one winter's night on the steps of the church of St. Jean le Rond at Paris, and brought up ...
— Self Help • Samuel Smiles
... displays no trace of being influenced by Bacon's work. After glancing at the superstitious reverence for the "Baconian Induction," he pointed out Bacon's ignorance of the progress of science up to his time, and his inability to divine the importance of what he knew by hearsay of the work of Copernicus, or Kepler, or Galileo; of Gilbert, his contemporary, or of Galen; and wound up by quoting Ellis's severe judgment of Bacon in the General Preface to the Philosophic Works, in Spedding's classical edition (page 38):—] "That his method is impracticable ...
— The Life and Letters of Thomas Henry Huxley Volume 2 • Leonard Huxley
... reverently clung to the dishonored remnants of the Ptolemaic theory, and scouted the philosophy of Copernicus which she vehemently averred was not worth "a pinch of snuff," else the water in the well would surely run out once in every twenty-four hours. Now, as she dived into the depths of her stocking-basket, collecting the socks neatly darned and rolled ...
— Vashti - or, Until Death Us Do Part • Augusta J. Evans Wilson
... appearance, polite, modest, speaking little but well, reserved in his answers, and with the manners of olden times. We conversed, and I could not help laughing when he said, with an air of perfect good faith, that a Christian could only admit the system of Copernicus as a clever hypothesis. I answered that it was the system of God Himself because it was that of nature, and that it was not in Holy Scripture that the laws ...
— The Memoires of Casanova, Complete • Jacques Casanova de Seingalt
... form, the reflected light 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
... the end which he has in view, there is a moment when each manufacturer represents in his own person society itself, sees better and farther than all other men combined, and frequently without being able to explain himself or make himself understood. When Copernicus, Kepler, and Galileo, Newton's predecessors, came to the point of saying to Christian society, then represented by the Church: "The Bible is mistaken; the earth revolves, and the sun is stationary," they were right against society, which, on the strength of its senses and traditions, contradicted ...
— The Philosophy of Misery • Joseph-Pierre Proudhon
... years before Newton, Galileo, and Copernicus were born, Isaiah was writing about the "orbit of the earth," and its insignificance in the eyes of the Creator of the host of heaven.[245] Job was conversing with his friends on the inclination of its axis, and its equilibrium in space: "He spreadeth out the north over the empty space, and hangeth ...
— Fables of Infidelity and Facts of Faith - Being an Examination of the Evidences of Infidelity • Robert Patterson
... Jupiter's satellites as the second great result achieved by the use of the telescope in the hands of Galileo. The fact that the planets were intrinsically dark bodies revolving round the sun, and reflecting its light, as he and Copernicus had maintained, thus received a further ocular demonstration. The Florentine astronomer describes in a letter to a friend how the planet, after emerging from superior conjunction as a morning star, gradually loses her rotundity on the side remote from the luminary, ...
— Young Folks' Library, Volume XI (of 20) - Wonders of Earth, Sea and Sky • Various
... sixteenth century men began here and there, somewhat timidly and tentatively, to rebel against the tyranny of antiquity, or rather to prepare the way for the open rebellion which was to break out in the seventeenth. Breaches were made in the proud citadel of ancient learning. Copernicus undermined the authority of Ptolemy and his predecessors; the anatomical researches of Vesalius injured the prestige of Galen; and Aristotle was attacked on many sides by men like Telesio, Cardan, Ramus, and Bruno. [Footnote: It has ...
— The Idea of Progress - An Inquiry Into Its Origin And Growth • J. B. Bury
... the fixed stars, then the sun above Venus and Mercury, and lastly the moon next to the earth. But he differed from Aristotle, who conceived that the earth revolves in an orbit round the centre of the planetary system, and turns upon its axis—two ideas in common with the doctrines which Copernicus afterward unfolded. But even he did not conceive the heliocentric theory that the sun is the centre of the universe. Archimedes and Hipparchus both rejected ...
— The Old Roman World • John Lord
... since their light is extinguished, these pleasures are lost to me for ever. Heaven justly inflicts the punishment which was predicted to me many years ago. When in prison, and impatiently languishing for liberty, I began to be discontented with the ways of Providence; Copernicus appeared to me in a dream; his celestial spirit conducted me over luminous stars, and, in a threatening voice, reprehended me for having murmured against him, at whose fiat all these worlds had proceeded from nothing. 'A time shall come (said he) when thine eyes shall ...
— Thaumaturgia • An Oxonian
... pardon, and in spite of lamentations, tears, and complaints. My music in the trunk, a certain ribbon on my heart, my soul full of anxiety: thus into the post-chaise. To be sure, everywhere in the town tears will flow in streams: from Copernicus to the fountain, from the bank to the column of King Sigismund; but I shall be cold and unfeeling as a stone, and laugh at all those who wish to take such ...
— Frederick Chopin as a Man and Musician - Volume 1-2, Complete • Frederick Niecks
... with material and religious power, fares ill; as with far-famed Copernicus, or "starry Galileo and his woes"; or, in a brave woman's daring words:—"He, who dares to see a truth not recognized in creeds, must ...
— Valere Aude - Dare to Be Healthy, Or, The Light of Physical Regeneration • Louis Dechmann
... admissions. For a 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 ...
— The Great Gray Plague • Raymond F. Jones
... 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 ...
— Ideal Commonwealths • Various
... Copernicus were persecuted as infidels, Kepler was branded with the stigma of heresy, "because," said he, "I take that side which seems to me to be consonant with the Word of God." Even the pure and simpleminded Newton, of whom Bishop Burnet ...
— Character • Samuel Smiles
... 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 knows, condemned ...
— The Mind in the Making - The Relation of Intelligence to Social Reform • James Harvey Robinson
... time of Thales of Miletus, in the fifth century B.C., down to that of Copernicus in the fifteenth and Tycho Brahe in the sixteenth century A.D., observations have been from time to time carried on with more or less correctness, until in the present day the altitudes of the lunar mountains have been determined with exactitude. Galileo ...
— Jules Verne's Classic Books • Jules Verne
... are consulted by nocturnal adventurers; but so it is, that when Cynthia shows a round and chubby disk, few daring deeds are done. Though true it may be, that of moonlight nights, jewelers' caskets and maidens' hearts have been burglariously broken into—and rifled, for aught Copernicus can tell. ...
— Mardi: and A Voyage Thither, Vol. I (of 2) • Herman Melville
... first Neapolitan, Oliver Cornwell, that Mynheer Baloon who was known as the Flying Dutchman, Julia Caesar, commonly known as the Serpent of the Nile—all these are richly suggestive. They call to mind the odd custom of wearing "clothes"; the incredible error of Copernicus and other wide and wild guesses of ancient "science"; the lost arts of telegramy, steam locomotion, printing, and the tempering of iron. They set us thinking of the zealous idolatry that led men on pious pilgrimages ...
— The Collected Works of Ambrose Bierce • Ambrose Bierce
... presented to the Emperor Alexander, who gave him sittings for a portrait bust; this was so successful that for some years Thorwaldsen employed skilled workmen to constantly repeat it, in order to fill the demand for it which was made upon him. While at Warsaw he received an order for a monument to Copernicus, which was dedicated in 1830; other important commissions were given him, and after visiting Cracow, Troppau, and Vienna, he reached Rome in December, 1820, where he was heartily welcomed by the artists, who gave him ...
— A History of Art for Beginners and Students - Painting, Sculpture, Architecture • Clara Erskine Clement
... to observe facts and to reason from them. It was inductive science, even though it had not yet fully grasped the importance and the powers of induction; and it laid the foundations of both mechanics and natural philosophy. Francis Bacon, Galileo, and Copernicus were the direct descendants of a Roger Bacon and a Michael Scot, as the steam engine was a direct product of the researches carried on in the Italian universities on the weight of the atmosphere, and of the mathematical and technical learning which ...
— Mutual Aid • P. Kropotkin
... who stultifies himself and vilifies his faith by apologetic articles in this or that secular review, in which he attempts to show that the Church which taught the inspiration of Genesis and condemned Galileo was all the time not untrue to the scientific conceptions of Copernicus and Darwin, is a very poor person in the eyes of many of us; and one thing is abundantly certain, that by no possibility could even Mrs. Ward have made him the hero of a novel. For a Helbeck, who has reckoned up the chances of life, and deliberately ...
— Morality as a Religion - An exposition of some first principles • W. R. Washington Sullivan
... for the Poet and his Purpose. Should any one of the readers of this Cycle doubt the enduring greatness of the lines, let him consider that I, Wolfgang Copernicus Addleburger, have seen fit to ...
— The Love Sonnets of a Car Conductor • Wallace Irwin
... 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 non potest." He described very ...
— Old-Time Makers of Medicine • James J. Walsh
... comparison and research. At the opening of that education of modern by ancient thought which we call the Renaissance, it was the words of Aristotle which sent Columbus sailing to the New World, while a fragment of Pythagorean astronomy set Copernicus thinking on that train of reasoning which has revolutionised the whole position of our planet in the universe. Then it was seen that the only meaning of progress is a return to Greek modes of thought. The monkish hymns which ...
— Selected Prose of Oscar Wilde - with a Preface by Robert Ross • Oscar Wilde
... Galileo, Copernicus, Newton, and John Brown have to wait the calmer judgments of future generations. These men believed that God sent them to do a certain work—to reveal a hidden truth; to pour light into the minds of benighted and superstitious ...
— History of the Negro Race in America from 1619 to 1880. Vol. 2 (of 2) - Negroes as Slaves, as Soldiers, and as Citizens • George Washington Williams
... Archimedes, and an Archimagus, and a Tycho Brahe, and a Copernicus; and thou art the darling of the Nine, and midwife to their wandering babe also! We take tea with that learned poet and critic on Tuesday night, at half-past five, in his neat library; the repast ...
— The Works of Charles and Mary Lamb, Vol. 5 • Edited by E. V. Lucas
... to square the circle. All we should aim at is the most convenient way of looking at a thing—the way that most sensible people are likely to find give them least trouble for some time to come. It is not true that the sun used to go round the earth until Copernicus's time, but it is true that until Copernicus's time it was most convenient to us to hold this. Still, we had certain ideas which could only fit in comfortably with our other ideas when we came to consider the sun as the ...
— The Note-Books of Samuel Butler • Samuel Butler
... was forty-five he had discovered more stars than Copernicus. They were not all first-magnitude twinklers. Some of them even glowed so feebly that you could see their light only when he stood behind them, the steady radiance of his genius shining through. But taken as a whole they made a brilliant constellation, furnishing much ...
— Half Portions • Edna Ferber
... astonishment of the beholder. However familiar we may be with the lunar surface, we can never gaze on these extraordinary formations, whether massed together apparently in inextricable confusion, or standing in isolated grandeur, like Copernicus, on the grey surface of the plains, without experiencing, in a scarcely diminished degree, the same sensation of wonder and admiration with which they were beheld for the first time. Although the attempt to bring all ...
— The Moon - A Full Description and Map of its Principal Physical Features • Thomas Gwyn Elger
... likewise an eminent astronomer. He believed that the earth was the center of the universe and that the sun, planets, and fixed stars all revolved around it. This Ptolemaic system was not overthrown until the grand discovery of Copernicus in the sixteenth ...
— EARLY EUROPEAN HISTORY • HUTTON WEBSTER
... 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 are certain ...
— A Journey through the Kingdom of Oude, Volumes I & II • William Sleeman
... 20. The work of Copernicus appeared in 1543, but the author's silence on the new theories of that astronomer can scarcely be considered an argument one way or the other in the question that has been raised respecting the ...
— A Select Collection of Old English Plays, Volume I. • R. Dodsley
... ushers and of the pupils—one named Angelmare, from Versailles, who used to cut off trousers-straps from old boots, M. Mirbal and his red whiskers, the two professors of linear drawing and large drawing, who were always wrangling, and the Pole, the fellow-countryman of Copernicus, with his planetary system on pasteboard, an itinerant astronomer whose lecture had been paid for by a dinner in the refectory, then a terrible debauch while they were out on a walking excursion, the first pipes they had smoked, the ...
— Sentimental Education, Volume II - The History of a Young Man • Gustave Flaubert
... painters and sculptors, Phidias, Parrhasius, Zenxis, Praxiteles, Scopas, Michael Angelo, Raphael and Rubens; among philanthropists, John Howard; among inventors, Archimedes, Watt, Fulton, Arkwright, Whitney and Morse; among astronomers, Copernicus, Galileo, Tycho Brahe, Newton, La Place and the elder Herschel. Here are sixty names of distinguished men, and yet the great religious leaders, excepting Moses and Zoroaster, have not been named. Among these stand Siddhartha ...
— Burroughs' Encyclopaedia of Astounding Facts and Useful Information, 1889 • Barkham Burroughs
... Plato, as expounded by Plotinus, had taken firm hold on his imagination. He was versed in the dialectics of the previous age, had mastered mediaeval cosmography and mathematics, and was probably already acquainted with Copernicus. The fragments of the Greek philosophers, especially of Pythagoras and Parmenides, whose metaphysics powerfully influenced his mind, had been assimilated. Perhaps the writings of Cardinal Cusa, the theologian ...
— Renaissance in Italy, Volumes 1 and 2 - The Catholic Reaction • John Addington Symonds
... observing the returns, and measuring the places, of the heavenly bodies. This was the sole astronomy of the Chinese and Chaldeans; but to it the vigorous Greek mind added a highly complex geometrical plan of their movements, for which Copernicus substituted a more harmonious system, without as yet any idea of a compelling cause. The planets revolved in circles because it was their nature to do so, just as laudanum sets to sleep because it possesses ...
— A Popular History of Astronomy During the Nineteenth Century - Fourth Edition • Agnes M. (Agnes Mary) Clerke
... work through a line of centuries. It was on this principle that one great poet has recently hailed his brother as "the ARIOSTO of the North," and ARIOSTO as "the SCOTT of the South." And can we deny the real existence of the genealogy of genius? Copernicus, Galileo, Kepler, and Newton! this is a ...
— Literary Character of Men of Genius - Drawn from Their Own Feelings and Confessions • Isaac D'Israeli
... the Turks became masters of the eastern shores of the Mediterranean, the European merchants were prevented from going to India and the East by the overland route, as had been done for generations. Thus, since geography was at this very time improved by the science of Copernicus and others, the natural inquiry was how to reach India by sea instead of going overland. Columbus, therefore, sailed due west to reach Asia, and stumbled upon a "New World" without knowing what he did; then Cabot, sailing from Bristol, sailed northwest to reach India, and stumbled upon the continent ...
— The Story of Extinct Civilizations of the West • Robert E. Anderson |
