Famous Astronomy Quotes & Sayings

You can not drop astronomy. To get through this semester, I must live vicariously through you and hear about Cam at least three days a week."
"I'm not going to drop the class-" Even though I sort of wanted to. "-But I doubt I'm going to have anything to tell you. It's not like we're even going to talk again."
Jacob let go of my arm and sat back, eyeing me. "Famous last words, Avery. — J. Lynn

A high-school girl, seated next to a famous astronomer at a dinner party, struck up a conversation with him by asking: "What do you do for a living?" "I study astronomy," he replied. "Really? said the teenager, wide-eyed. "I finished astronomy last year." — James Keller

At the Egyptian city of Naucratis there was a famous old god whose name was Theuth; the bird which is called the Ibis was sacred to him, and he was the inventor of many arts, such as arithmetic and calculation and geometry and astronomy and draughts and dice, but his great discovery was the use of letters. — Plato

There it was that I found and visited the famous Galileo, grown old, a prisoner to the Inquisition, for thinking in astronomy otherwise than the Franciscan and Dominican licensers thought. And though I knew that England then was groaning loudest under the prelatical yoke, nevertheless I took it as a pledge of future happiness, that other nations were so persuaded of her liberty. Yet was it beyond my hope that those worthies were then breathing in her air, who should be her leaders to such a deliverance, as shall never be forgotten by any revolution of time that this world hath to finish. — John Milton

Astronomy was full of such intriguing but meaningless coincidences. The most famous was the fact that, from the Earth, both Sun and Moon have the same apparent diameter. — Arthur C. Clarke

In the year 1456 ... a Comet was seen passing Retrograde between the Earth and the sun ... Hence I dare venture to foretell, that it will return again in the year 1758. — Edmond Halley

As the twentieth century began, science equaled a materialistic worldview. As the twenty-first century began, the worldview of science, at least of physics and astronomy, may have traded place with that of religion. Consider Einstein's famous equation E = mc2. Nothing of matter dies but continues on in another form, elsewhere. The church divines and theologians for two thousand years have devised arguments and "proofs" of immortality but nothing equal to this. — Huston Smith