Quotes by Galileo Galilei

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

The nature of the human mind is such that unless it is stimulated by images of things acting upon it from without, all remembrance of them passes easily away.

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

He who looks the higher is the more highly distinguished, and turning over the great book of nature (which is the proper object of philosophy) is the way to elevate ones gaze.

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.

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

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

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.

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

“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.”

“My dear Kepler, what would you say of the learned here, who, replete with the pertinacity of the asp, have steadfastly refused to cast a glance through the telescope? What shall we make of this? Shall we laugh, or shall we cry?”

“I have been in my bed for five weeks, oppressed with weakness and other infirmities from which my age, seventy four years, permits me not to hope release. Added to this (proh dolor! [O misery!]) the sight of my right eye — that eye whose labors (dare I say it) have had such glorious results — is for ever lost. That of the left, which was and is imperfect, is rendered null by continual weeping.”

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

“By denying scientific principles, one may maintain any paradox.”

“Who would set a limit to the mind? 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.”

“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.”

“(T)he increase of known truths stimulates the investigation, establishment, and growth of the arts.”