With regard to matters requiring thought: the less people know and understand about them the more positively they attempt to argue concerning them.
We cannot teach people anything; we can only help them discover it within themselves.
Two truths cannot contradict one another.
You can't teach anybody anything only make them realize the answers are already inside them.
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.
In questions of science the authority of a thousand is not worth the humble reasoning of a single individual.
Science proceeds more by what it has learned to ignore than what it takes into account.
To command their professors of astronomy to refute their own observations is to command them not to see what they do see and not to understand what they do understand.
Who would dare assert that we know all there is to be known?
Names and attributes must be accommodated to the essence of things and not the essence to the names since things come first and names afterwards.
Philosophy itself cannot but benefit from our disputes for if our conceptions prove true new achievements will be made; if false their refutation will further confirm the original doctrines.
For my part I consider the earth very noble and admirable precisely because of the diverse alterations changes generations etc. that occur in it incessantly.
Being infinitely amazed so do I give thanks to God Who has been pleased to make me the first observer of marvelous things unrevealed to bygone ages.
Holy Scripture could never lie or err...its decrees are of absolute and inviolable truth.
E pur si muove. "Albeit It does move". (That's what Galileo purportedly muttered after torturers forced him to recant his theory that the earth orbits the sun.)
But some besides allegiance to their original error possess I know not what fanciful interest in remaining hostile not so much toward the things in question as toward their discoverer.
Nature's great book is written in mathematics.
There are those who reason well but they are greatly outnumbered by those who reason badly.
The Bible shows the way to go to heaven not the way the heavens go.
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.
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.
I do not feel obliged to believe that the same God who has endowed us with sense reason and intellect has intended us to forego their use.
It is a beautiful and delightful sight to behold the body of the Moon.
I would beg the wise and learned fathers [of the church] to consider with all diligence the difference which exists between matters of mere opinion and matters of demonstration.
If I were again beginning my studies I would follow the advice of Plato and start with mathematics.
Nature is written in mathematical language.
See now the power of truth; the same experiment which at first glance seemed to show one thing when more carefully examined assures us of the contrary.
I do not know what to say in a case so surprising so unlooked for and so novel.
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.
The laws of Nature are written in the language of mathematics...the symbols are triangles circles and other geometrical figures without whose help it is impossible to comprehend a single word.
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.
The Milky Way is nothing else but a mass of innumerable stars planted together in clusters.
You cannot teach a man anything you can only help him find it within himself.
Infinities and indivisibles transcend our finite understanding the former on account of their magnitude the latter because of their smallness; Imagine what they are when combined.
I have never met a man so ignorant that I couldn't learn something from him.
Well since paradoxes are at hand let us see how it might be demonstrated that in a finite continuous extension it is not impossible for infinitely many voids to be found.
Some merely to contradict what I had said did not scruple to cast doubt upon things they had seen with their own eyes again and again.
[Copernicus] did not ignore the Bible but he knew very well that if his doctrine were proved then it could not contradict the Scriptures when they were rightly understood.
Nothing occurs contrary to nature except the impossible and that never occurs.
I Galileo son of the late Vicenzo Galilei swear that I never said that the prime numbers are useless. What I said was that you cannot count lunar craters by counting 2 3 5 7 ...
You may force me to say what you wish; you may revile me for saying what I do. But it moves.
God is known by nature in his works and by doctrine in his revealed word.
Nothing can be taught to a man only it's possibly to help him to discover it inside.
All truths are easy to understand once they are discovered; the point is to discover them.
The earth in fair and grateful exchange pays back to the moon an illumination similar to that which it receives from her throughout nearly all the darkest gloom of the night.
Mathematics is the key and door to the sciences.
I think that in the discussion of natural problems we ought to begin not with the Scriptures but with experiments and demonstrations.
By denying scientific principles one may maintain any paradox.
They who depend upon manifest observations will philosophize better than those who persist in opinions repugnant to the senses.
If you could see the earth illuminated when you were in a place as dark as night it would look to you more splendid than the moon.
They seemed to forget that the increase of known truths stimulates the investigation establishment and growth of the arts; not their dimination or destruction.
I've loved the stars too fondly to be fearful of the night.
Nature...does not act by means of many things when it can do so by means of a few.
One can understand nature only when one has learned the language and the signs in which it speaks to us; but this language is mathematics and these signs are methematical figures.
Where the senses fail us reason must step in.
Knowing thyself that is the greatest wisdom.
The greatest wisdom is to get to know oneself.
Scripture is a book about going to Heaven. It's not a book about how the heavens go.
The laws of nature are written by the hand of God in the language of mathematics.
Mathematics is the language with which God has written the universe.
I would say here something that was heard from an ecclesiastic of the most eminent degree: The intention of the Holy Spirit is to teach us how one goes to heaven not how the heavens go.
To be humane we must ever be ready to pronounce that wise ingenious and modest statement 'I do not know'.
It is surely harmful to souls to make it a heresy to believe what is proved.
Wine is sunlight held together by water.
Holy Writ was intended to teach men how to go to Heaven not how the heavens go.
In the sciences the authority of thousands of opinions is not worth as much as one tiny spark of reason in an individual man.
Nonetheless it moves.
And yet it moves.
To understand the Universe you must understand the language in which it's written the language of Mathematics.
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.
See now the power of truth.
Nature is relentless and unchangeable and it is indifferent as to whether its hidden reasons and actions are understandable to man or not.
The book of nature is written in the language of mathematics.
What has philosophy got to do with measuring anything? It's the mathematicians you have to trust and they measure the skies like we measure a field.
It was granted to me alone to discover all the new phenomena in the sky and nothing to anybody else. This is the truth which neither envy nor malice can supress.
Measure what is measurable and make measurable what is not so.
Measure what can be measured and make measureable what cannot be measured.
We must say that there are as many squares as there are numbers.
Mide lo que sea medible y haz medible lo que no lo sea