Johannes Quotes & Sayings

Even Johannes Kepler, Isaac Newton, Charles Darwin, Gregor Mendel, and Albert Einstein made serious mistakes. But the scientific enterprise arranges things so that teamwork prevails: What one of us, even the most brilliant among us, misses, another of us, even someone much less celebrated and capable, may detect and rectify. — Carl Sagan

I believe only and alone in the service of Jesus Christ. In him is all refuge and solace. — Johannes Kepler

The years between Roger Bacon's birth, in 1220, and Uthred's death, in 1370, are considered the final flowering of the Middle Ages. They were followed by a longer, grimmer period in Europe, during which the machinery for rooting out heresy defeated enlightened discourse almost completely. The early condemnation of works by William Ockham, Johannes Eckehart, the spiritual Franciscans, and Dante signaled the start of a breakdown in the integrity of Western thought. During this Great Interruption, xenophobia replaced curiosity, interest in Islam and the classics withered, and Muslim thought was anathematized or ignored. Fifty years later, it was no longer wise to learn Arabic, Hebrew, or even Greek. — Michael Wolfe

Like some winter animal the moon licks the salt of your hand,
Yet still your hair foams violet as a lilac tree
From which a small wood-owl calls. — Johannes Bobrowski

God suffers in the multitude of souls whom His word can not reach. Religious truth is imprisoned in a small number of manuscript books, which confine instead of spread the public treasure. Let us break the seal which seals up holy things and give wings to Truth in order that she may win every soul that comes into the world by her word no longer written at great expense by hands easily palsied, but multiplied like the wind by an untiring machine. — Johannes Gutenberg

The Creator, the fountain of all wisdom, the approver of perpetual order, the eternal and superessential spring of geometry and harmonics. — Johannes Kepler

I was just laying aside a Lausanne paper I'd bought in Zurich when my eye was caught by a report that said the remains of the Bernese alpine guide Johannes Naegeli, missing since summer 1914, had been released by the Oberaar glacier, seventy-two years later. And so they are ever returning to us, the dead. At times they come back from the ice more than seven decades later and are found at the edge of the moraine, a few polished bones and a pair of hobnailed boots. — W.G. Sebald

Like blind hens, we are ignorant of our own self and the depths within us. — Johannes Tauler

If the moon and earth were not retained in their orbits by their animal force or some other equivalent, the earth would mount to the moon by a fifty-fourth part of their distance, and the moon fall towards the earth through the other fifty-three parts, and they would there meet, assuming, however, that the substance of both is of the same density. — Johannes Kepler

A trophy's value isn't measured by the worth of its metal but by the amount of work that's required to obtain it — Johannes Schiefer

God touches and moves, warns and desires all equally, and He wants one quite as much as another. The inequality lies in the way in which His touch, His warnings, and His gifts are received. — Johannes Tauler

Sure, I acted in films in the Third Reich, entertainment films, which distracted countless people inside and outside Germany from daily life during war. — Johannes Heesters

The effects of color are controlled by intuition. — Johannes Itten

Do we ask what profit the little bird hopes for in singing? — Johannes Kepler

Priusquam autem ad creationem, hoc est ad finem omnis disputationis, veniamus: tentanda omnia existimo.
However, before we come to [special] creation, which puts an end to all discussion: I think we should try everything else. — Johannes Kepler

My greatest desire is that I may perceive the God whom I find everywhere in the external world, in like manner also within and inside myself. — Johannes Kepler

Johannes said greedy people can never be happy, and I would so much like to know what it feels like to be happy. Johannes said that when you very much want something you haven't got, you no longer care for what you have got. I'm not sure I understand, but I suppose he meant that things are only worth having if you think they are. — Anne Holm

Everything depends on this: a fathomless sinking into a fathomless nothingness. — Johannes Tauler

Cabal took her arm, and they processed towards the cafe like old friends, or at least the sort of old friends in which the lady wears a somewhat smug smile while the gentleman scowls darkly. — Jonathan L. Howard

A good meditation, even when it is interrupted by occasional nodding, is much more beneficial than many outward religious exercises. — Johannes Tauler

Sky-bound was the mind, Earth-bound the body rests — Johannes Kepler

Geometry existed before the creation. It is co-eternal with the mind of God ... Geometry provided God with a model for the Creation ... — Johannes Kepler

How lucky is the man who, like Mozart and others, goes to the tavern of an evening and writes some fresh music. For he lives while he is creating. — Johannes Brahms

Along a series of lines running from longer to shorter wavelengths the effect of the electric field becomes greater as the serial numbers increase - that is, as the wavelength decreases. — Johannes Stark

Sneaking out at night. You think you're so clever, but you're not. Either you're a saboteur, Johannes, or you've got a mistress.
The Reverend's wife, Grete
The Informer — Steen Langstrup

The movement of the emitters of the spectral lines may be deduced on the basis of the Doppler principle. — Johannes Stark

A probing analysis of the problems of evolution forms the basis of my prose. — Johannes Vilhelm Jensen

Repudiating the sensible world, which he neither sees himself nor believes from those who have, the Peripatetic joins combat by childish quibbling in a world on paper, and denies the Sun shines because he himself is blind. — Johannes Kepler

In the most intimate, hidden and innermost ground of the soul, God is always essentially, actively, and substantially present. Here the soul possesses everything by grace which God possesses by nature. — Johannes Tauler

They died. Along with three other men who had joined our group. We were betrayed. The porter had told his girlfriend about the operation. They'd only just met each other. Jens shot her a week later."

Johannes aka 'BB'
The Informer — Steen Langstrup

I sometimes ponder on variation form and it seems to me it ought to be more restrained, purer. — Johannes Brahms

In prayerful silence you must look into your own heart. No one can tell you better than yourself what comes between you and God. Ask yourself. Then listen! — Johannes Tauler

Illusions may flatter us, confuse us, or betray us, Drakkonwehr. Or they may be images we cling to when the truth is too difficult to face. — Helen C. Johannes

Privacy is a bourgeois fantasy. — Johannes Grenzfurthner

What a deep [trust] in the rationality of the structure of the world and what a longing to understand even a small glimpse of the reason revealed in the world there must have been in Kepler and Newton to enable them to unravel the mechanism of the heavens in long years of lonely work! — Albert Einstein

I am much occupied with the investigation of the physical causes [of motions in the Solar System]. My aim in this is to show that the celestial machine is to be likened not to a divine organism but rather to a clockwork ... insofar as nearly all the manifold movements are carried out by means of a single, quite simple magnetic force. This physical conception is to be presented through calculation and geometry. — Johannes Kepler

We must prepare the ground for creativity. And if this also gives rise later to success in the economic sense, success in terms of Euros and Cents, this will by no means reduce my joy. — Johannes Rau

He's painted himself into a corner and a thousand lazy reporters and ever-so-sincere politicians had rendered the only word that he could use comically melodramatic. 'I think ... Johannes Cabal ... is evil. — Jonathan L. Howard

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? — Galileo Galilei

I shall be your poet! I do not want to be a poet for others; make your appearance, and I shall be your poet. I shall eat my own poem, and that will be my food. Or do you find me unworthy? Just as a temple dancer dances to the honor of the god Gudutl, so I have consecrated myself to your service; light, thinly clad, limber, unarmed, I renounce everything. I own nothing; I desire to own nothing; I love nothing; I have nothing to lose-but have I not thereby become more worthy of you, you who long ago must have been tired of depriving people of what they love, tired of their craven sniveling and craven pleading. Surprise me-I am ready — Soren Kierkegaard

The essential attribute of a new sense is, not the perception of external objects or influences which ordinarily do not act upon the senses, but that external causes should excite in it a new and peculiar kind of sensation different from all the sensations of our five senses. — Johannes P. Muller

Stories about [the German composer Johannes] Brahms's rudeness and wit amused me in particular. For instance, I loved the one about how a great wine connoisseur invited the composer to dinner. 'This is the Brahms of my cellar,' he said to his guests, producing a dust-covered bottle and pouring some into the master's glass. Brahms looked first at the color of the wine, then sniffed its bouquet, finally took a sip, and put the glass down without saying a word. 'Don't you like it?' asked the host. 'Hmm,' Brahms muttered. 'Better bring your Beethoven!' — Arthur Rubinstein

If the earth should cease to attract its waters to itself all the waters of the sea would be raised and would flow to the body of the moon. — Johannes Kepler

Cabal regarded her with mild amusement. "Smile when you whisper," he advised her. "You're supposed to be flirting with me, if you recall?"
She stared at him icily. Then suddenly her expression thawed and she smiled winsomely, her eyes dewy with romantic love. "Oh, sweetheart ... somebody tried to kill you? Whosoever would do such a thing to my nimpty-bimpty snookums?"
Cabal could not have been more horrified if she'd pulled off her face to reveal a gaping chasm of eternal night from which glistening tentacles coiled and groped. That had already happened to him once in his life, and he wasn't keen to repeat the experience.
"What?" he managed in a dry whisper.
"Smile when you whisper," she said, her expression fixed and blood-curdlingly coquettish. You're supposed to be flirting with me, remember?"
"Please don't do that. — Jonathan L. Howard

We do not ask for what useful purpose the birds do sing, for song is their pleasure since they were created for singing. Similarly, we ought not to ask why the human mind troubles to fathom the secrets of the heavens ... — Johannes Kepler

I never mingled with men, but I came home less of a man than I went out. — Johannes Tauler

The German astronomer Johannes Kepler coined the term "camera obscura" in the early seventeenth century, but by then the phenomenon had been known for millennia; in fact, it is perhaps the oldest known optical illusion. Some form of camera obscura was most likely behind a popular illusion performed in ancient Greece and Rome, in which spectral images were cast upon the smoke of burning incense by performers using concave metal mirrors - hence the expression "smoke and mirrors. — Jennifer Ouellette

You pathetic humans! It escapes me how you endure any trial long enough even to breed, yet here you are. And why do your kind persist at all? Because every now and then - once a century, perhaps - ONE of you understands this: Death is what you accept only when you have spent all that you are - to the very last drop of your sweat and blood - in order to save what you love. That, son of Koronolan, is what a hero, a true warrior, would do. — Helen C. Johannes

The greatest thing that can happen to the state of Queensland and the nation of Australia would be if and when we get rid of the media. Then we would live in peace and tranquility - but no one would know anything!. — Johannes "Joh" Bjelke-Petersen

Thus God himself was too kind to remain idle and began to play the game of signatures signing his likeness unto the world: therefore I chance to think that all nature and the graceful sky are symbolized in the art of Geometria. — Johannes Kepler

The objective laws of form and color help to strengthen a person's powers and to expand his creative gift. — Johannes Itten

After the birth of printing books became widespread. Hence everyone throughout Europe devoted himself to the study of literature ... Every year, especially since 1563, the number of writings published in every field is greater than all those produced in the past thousand years. The Paracelsians have created medicine anew and the Copernicans have created astronomy anew. I really believe that at last the world is alive, indeed seething, and that the stimuli of these remarkable conjunctions did not act in vain. — Johannes Kepler

To have nothing to do, to sit there waiting for little aches and pains, is fundamentally wrong. Life has to be lived. — Johannes Heesters

During half a century of literary work, I have endeavoured to introduce the philosophy of evolution into the sphere of literature, and to inspire my readers to think in evolutionary terms. — Johannes Vilhelm Jensen

I esteem myself happy to have as great an ally as you in my search for truth. I will read your work ... all the more willingly because I have for many years been a partisan of the Copernican view because it reveals to me the causes of many natural phenomena that are entirely incomprehensible in the light of the generally accepted hypothesis. To refute the latter I have collected many proofs, but I do not publish them, because I am deterred by the fate of our teacher Copernicus who, although he had won immortal fame with a few, was ridiculed and condemned by countless people (for very great is the number of the stupid).

{Letter to fellow revolutionary astronomer Johannes Kepelr} — Galileo Galilei

In this book, you will encounter various interesting geometries that have been thought to hold the keys to the universe. Galileo Galilei (1564-1642) suggested that "Nature's great book is written in mathematical symbols." Johannes Kepler (1571-1630) modeled the solar system with Platonic solids such as the dodecahedron. In the 1960s, physicist Eugene Wigner (1902-1995) was impressed with the "unreasonable effectiveness of mathematics in the natural sciences." Large Lie groups, like E8-which is discussed in the entry "The Quest for Lie Group E8 (2007)"- may someday help us create a unified theory of physics. in 2007, Swedish American cosmologist Max Tegmark published both scientific and popular articles on the mathematical universe hypothesis, which states that our physical reality is a mathematical structure-in other words, our universe in not just described by mathematics-it is mathematics. — Clifford A. Pickover

God in His wisdom has decided that He will reward no works but His own. — Johannes Tauler

Johannes Burchard. The only man in Rome whose face remains the same be it perfume or shit under his nose. — Sarah Dunant

The end of all motion is its beginning; for it terminates at no other end save its own beginning from which begins to be moved and to which it tends ever to return, in order to cease and rest in it. — Johannes Scotus Eriugena

Let God and all his creation teach you what your sins are. — Johannes Tauler

When ships to sail the void between the stars have been built, there will step forth men to sail these ships. — Johannes Kepler

The squares of the periodic times are to each other as the cubes of the mean distances. — Johannes Kepler

Judge yourself; if you sincerely and humbly do that, you will not be judged by God. — Johannes Tauler

Anger should be especially kept down in punishing, because he who comes to punishment in wrath will never hold that middle course which lies between the too much and the too little. It is also true that it would be desirable that they who hold the office of Judges should be like the laws, which approach punishment not in a spirit of anger but in one of equity. — Johannes Voet

Color is life; for a world without color appears to us as dead. Colors are primordial ideas, the children of light. — Johannes Itten

I owe all my knowledge to the German inventor, Johannes Gutenberg! — Mehmet Murat Ildan

A mind is accustomed to mathematical deduction, when confronted with the faulty foundations of astrology, resists a long, long time, like an obstinate mule, until compelled by beating and curses to put its foot into that dirty puddle. — Johannes Kepler

The emitters of the spectral series are without exception single atoms, not compounds of atoms. — Johannes Stark

For many years I was engaged in journalism, writing articles and chronicles for the daily press without ever joining the staff of any newspaper. — Johannes Vilhelm Jensen

We cling nervously to the melody, but we don't handle it freely, we don't really make anything new out of it, we merely overload it. — Johannes Brahms

Such sins, even if they do not kill all grace in us, do harm, nevertheless; and though they are only venial in themselves, they make us apt, ready, and inclined to lose grace and to fall into mortal sin. — Johannes Tauler

There must be some definite cause why, whenever snow begins to fall, its initial formation invariably displays the shape of a six-cornered starlet. For if it happens by chance, why do they not fall just as well with five corners or with seven? . . . Who carved the nucleus, before it fell, into six horns of ice? - From "On the Six-Cornered Snowflake," by Johannes Kepler, 1610 — Anthony Doerr

What would become of all historical biography if it was written only with consideration for other peoples' feelings? — Johannes Brahms

But it is equally necessary to consider the implications for a society if there are fewer and fewer young people making music because we are economising on music schools or musical education in schools. — Johannes Rau

The sun alone appears, by virtue of his dignity and power, suited for this motive duty (of moving the planets) and worthy to become the home of God himself. — Johannes Kepler

A beam of luminous hydrogen canal rays has, owing to its velocity, exactly the same direction as that of the electric field in which it may be made to move. — Johannes Stark

Since we astronomers are priests of the highest God in regard to the book of nature, it befits us to be thoughtful, not of the glory of our minds, but rather, above all else, of the glory of God. — Johannes Kepler

The grounding in natural sciences which I obtained in the course of my medical studies, including preliminary examinations in botany, zoology, physics, and chemistry, was to become decisive in determining the trend of my literary work. — Johannes Vilhelm Jensen

Between black and white there throbs the universe of chromatic phenomena. — Johannes Itten

Blood answers blood, especially that given for the sake of others. — Helen C. Johannes

As soon as somebody demonstrates the art of flying, settlers from our species of man will not be lacking on the moon and Jupiter ... Given ships or sails adapted to the breezes of heaven, there will be those who will not shrink from even that vast expanse. — Johannes Kepler

We ought not to ask why the human mind troubles to fathom the secrets of the universe. The diversity of the phenomena of nature is so great, and the treasures hidden in the skies so rich, precisely in order that the human mind shall never be lacking in fresh nourishment. — Johannes Kepler

Why are things as they are and not otherwise? — Johannes Kepler

Leonie Barrow's voice was quiet but clear. With Marechal's eyes on her, she said, "Cabal is more dangerous then you can believe, Count. Both the angels and the devils fear him. He's a monster, but an evenhanded one. I know he is capable of the most appalling acts of evil." Her glance moved to Cabal, who was listening dispassionately. "I believe he is also capable of great good. But to predict which he will do next isn't easy or safe."
Marechal grimaced. "What is your association with this man? Public relations or something?"
"I loathe him," she said with sudden venom. The, more quietly, "And I admire him. You're right; he didn't have to come back. He's taken a big risk, but I know he's taken bigger. I can't tell you whether he's a monster or playing the hero right now, but I know one thing. You made the biggest mistake of your life when you made an enemy of him. — Jonathan L. Howard

Sensation is not the conduction of a quality or state of external bodies to consciousness, but the conduction of a quality or state of our nerves to consciousness, excited by an external cause. — Johannes P. Muller

He who will please the crowd and for the sake of the most ephemeral renown will either proclaim those things which nature does not display or even will publish genuine miracles of nature without regard to deeper causes is a spiritually corrupt person ... With the best of intentions I publicly speak to the crowd (which is eager for things new) on the subject of what is to come. — Johannes Kepler

Some of the greatest mathematical minds of all ages, from Pythagoras and Euclid in ancient Greece, through the medieval Italian mathematician Leonardo of Pisa and the Renaissance astronomer Johannes Kepler, to present-day scientific figures such as Oxford physicist Roger Penrose, have spent endless hours over this simple ratio and its properties. But the fascination with the Golden Ratio is not confined just to mathematicians. Biologists, artists, musicians, historians, architects, psychologists, and even mystics have pondered and debated the basis of its ubiquity and appeal. In fact, it is probably fair to say that the Golden Ratio has inspired thinkers of all disciplines like no other number in the history of mathematics. — Mario Livio

I read more books for research purposes, whether it's a fictionalized biography of Johannes Gutenberg or a stack of urban fantasies. — Jim C. Hines

I am a Lutheran astrologer, I throw away the nonsense and keep the hard kernel. — Johannes Kepler

At the head of these new discoveries and insights comes the establishment of the facts that electricity is composed of discrete particles of equal size, or quanta, and that light is an electromagnetic wave motion. — Johannes Stark

It may be well to wait a century for a reader, as God has waited six thousand years for an observer. — Johannes Kepler

To follow in Beethoven's footsteps transcends one's strength. — Johannes Brahms

What matters most is a good and ready will to obey God. — Johannes Tauler

In the school of the spirit, man learns wisdom through humility. — Johannes Tauler

But Johannes had said, Politeness is something you owe other people, because when you show a little courtesy, everything becomes easier and better. But first and foremost, it's something you owe yourself. You are David. — Anne Holm

We saved the lives of a whole family that night. Children, parents, uncles, aunts, grandparents, all sailed to safety in Sweden inside a little fisherman's boat."

Johannes aka 'BB'
The Informer by Steen Langstrup — Steen Langstrup

Rid yourself of anything that is not directed toward God. — Johannes Tauler

Ships and sails proper for the heavenly air should be fashioned. Then there will also be people, who do not shrink from the dreary vastness of space. — Johannes Kepler

Moreover, the abundance of chemical compounds and their importance in daily life hindered the chemist from investigating the question, in what does the individuality of the atoms of different elements consist. — Johannes Stark

Commemoration of Katherine of Alexandria, Martyr, 4th century If ye keep watch over your hearts, and listen for the Voice of God and learn of Him, in one short hour ye can learn more from Him than ye could learn from Man in a thousand years. — Johannes Tauler