Quotes & Sayings About Orbits

To become an abstraction: The Mother, Down On One Knee. This was life after he came - she orbits him, I chart her movements. That she could call him a blessing, the sun in her sky. She was no more the girl that I'd married. — David Foster Wallace

Though we feel we can choose what we do, our understanding of the molecular basis of biology shows that biological processes are governed by the laws of physics and chemistry and therefore are as determined as the orbits of the planets. — Stephen Hawking

One day man will connect his
apparatus to the very wheel work of
the universe. The very forces that
motivate the planets in their orbits
and cause them to rotate will rotate
his own machinery. — Nikola Tesla

For until that God who rules all the region of the sky ... has freed you from the fetters of your body, you cannot gain admission here. Men were created with the understanding that they were to look after that sphere called Earth, which you see in the middle of the temple. Minds have been given to them out of the eternal fires you call fixed stars and planets, those spherical solids which, quickened with divine minds, journey through their circuits and orbits with amazing speed. — Marcus Tullius Cicero

And maybe that's the secret: Maybe we do go in circles, but they're orbits, created by the gravity of our hearts and hopes, and so if we stay true to ourselves, we will face the same situations again, but each time we come around, we know more, we've grown, learned, and this time we can get it right, or at least a little better. — Kevin Emerson

We approach our lives on different trajectories, each of us spinning in our own separate, shining orbits. What gives this life its resonance is when those trajectories cross and we become engaged with each other, for as long or as fleetingly as we do. There's a shared energy then, and it can feel as though the whole universe is in the process of coming together. I live for those times. No one is truly ever "just passing through." Every encounter has within it the power of enchantment, if we're willing to look for it. — Richard Wagamese

I saw nothing more now than the pallor of my face, with deep orbits, buried in the twilight, and my mouth filled with a silence which gently but surely stifles and destroys. — Henri Barbusse

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

I've been out here pondering the meaning of life." "That bad, huh?" "Not so bad. They're good kids. Just drifting out into their own orbits already. It's natural, it's right. Though I guess I have this image ... I don't know ... " "Of some perfect, endless family life?" she said. "All happiness and McDonald's commercials?" "No McDonald's, but, yeah, I guess so. Something that doesn't just dissolve in a burst of cell phones and grumpiness, then whoosh away into biannual visits." "You're — Roland Merullo

If some essential part of me was already disappearing as my children moved into increasingly wider orbits, well then, I wanted to rech out and claim something else to take its place. — Katrina Kenison

We all want to break our orbits, float like a satellite gone wild in space, run the risk of disintegration. We all want to take our lives in our own hands and hurl them out among the stars. — David Bottoms

So long, I replied, may we all have one good flight before we rest among flowers and the orbits of hungry worms. — Rawi Hage

This world extends beyond this room, Adele. There are the streets of Vienna and beyond that Europe and beyond that a globe in space in orbit around a star in a universe. But how do I know that for sure? I cannot see the globe spinning on its axis right now as I speak to you. How can I be sure? I can be sure because it's logical; the mathematics is sound and respected by the orbits of the planets. I can verify it's true, not by looking at it, but by thinking about it. — Janna Levin

Words have no single fixed meaning. Like wayward electrons, they can spin away from their initial orbits and enter a wider magnetic field. No one owns them or has a proprietary right to dictate how they will be used. — David Lehman

Jeremy Mars knows a lot about the planet Mars, although he's never been there. He knows some girls, and yet he doesn't know much about them. He wishes there were books about girls, the way there are books about Mars, that you could observe the orbits and brightness of girls through telescopes without appearing to be perverted. — Kelly Link

Therefore, in the course of the work I have followed this plan: I describe in the first book all the positions of the orbits together with the movements which I ascribe to the Earth, in order that this book might contain, as it were, the general scheme of the universe. — Nicolaus Copernicus

The result of the scientific work we have been considering was that the outlook of educated men was completely transformed. At the beginning of the century, Sir Thomas Browne took part in trials for witchcraft; at the end, such a thing would have been impossible. In Shakespeare's time, comets were still portents; after the publication of Newton's Principia in 1687, it was known that he and Halley had calculated the orbits of certain comets, and that they were as obedient as the planets to the law of gravitation. The reign of law had established its hold on men's imaginations, making such things as magic and sorcery incredible. In 1700 the mental outlook of educated men was completely modern; in 1600, except among a very few, it was still largely medieval. — Bertrand Russell

Striving after good theology is similar to managing a sweet tooth. Psychological dynamics will always make certain theological systems more or less appealing. And yet psychologically appealing and intuitive theological systems are not always healthy. In short, these psychological dynamics function as a sweet tooth, a kind of cognitive temptation that pulls the intellectually lazy or unreflective (because we are busy folk with day jobs) into theological orbits that hamper the mission of the church. As with managing the sweet tooth, vigilance and care are needed to keep us on a healthy path. — Richard Beck

Boldwood looked at her - not slily, critically, or understandingly, but blankly at gaze, in the way a reaper looks up at a passing train - as something foreign to his element, and but dimly understood. To Boldwood women had been remote phenomena rather than necessary complements - comets of such uncertain aspect, movement, and permanence, that whether their orbits were as geometrical, unchangeable, and as subject to laws as his own, or as absolutely erratic as they superficially appeared, he had not deemed it his duty to consider. He — Thomas Hardy

You be you and I'll be me, today and today and today, and let's trust the future to tomorrow. Let the stars keep track of us. let us ride our own orbits and trust that they will meet. May our reunion be not a finding but a sweet collision of destinies! Love and Love and Love Again, Stargirl. — Jerry Spinelli

Do not follow me! Let's just be fabulously where we are and who we are. You be you and I'll be me, today and today and today, and let's trust the future to tommorrow. Let the stars keep track of us. Let us ride our own orbits and trust that they will meet. May our reunion be not a finding but a sweet collision of destinies! — Jerry Spinelli

Suns are extinguished or become corrupted, planets perish and scatter across the wastes of the sky; other suns are kindled, new planets formed to make their revolutions or describe new orbits, and man, an infinitely minute part of a globe which itself is only an imperceptible point in the immense whole, believes that the universe is made for himself. — Paul Henri Thiry D'Holbach

Nothing happens in the brain, except the gradual rust and detrition of the cells. But in the mind, worlds unclassified, undenominated, unassimilated, form, break, unite, dissolve, and harmonize ceaselessly. In the mind-world ideas are the indestructible elements which form the jeweled constellations of the interior life. We move within their orbits freely if we follow their intricate patterns, enslaved or possessed if we try to subjugate them. Everything external is but a reflection projected by the mind machine. — Henry Miller

She could see lines choices made and choices left untouched intertwine his soul in a rich mesh of pulsating orbits. She could see the value of past intentions, the trials he had chosen to bear and the wisdom that lay concealed within the mortal body. She knew that if she spoke of this, he would not believe her. No one believes in the perfections of the soul. There always is a certain relativity to events that throws a shadow against the perfection within each one. Seeing perfection consistently becomes a forbidden luxury, or maybe a practical flaw. — Shradhdha. S

Anaxagoras is said to have predicted that if the heavenly bodies should be loosened by some slip or shake, one of them might be torn away, and might plunge and fall down to earth; and he said that none of the stars was in its original position; for being of stone, and heavy, their shining light is caused by friction with the revolving aether, and they are forced along in fixed orbits by the whirling impulse which gave them their circular motion, and this was what prevented them from falling to our earth in the first place, when cold and heavy bodies were separated from universal matter. — Plutarch

Dynamical beauty transcends specific objects and phenomena, and invites us to imagine the expanse of possibilities. For example, the sizes and shapes of actual planetary orbits are not simple. They are neither the (compounded) circles of Aristotle, Ptolemy, and Nicolaus Copernicus, nor even the more nearly accurate ellipses of Kepler, but rather curves that must be calculated numerically, as functions of time, evolving in complicated ways that depend on the positions and masses of the Sun and the other planets. There is great beauty and simplicity here, but it is only fully evident when we understand the deep design. The appearance of particular objects does not exhaust the beauty of the laws. — Frank Wilczek

What ordinary men are directly aware of and what they try to do are bounded by the private orbits in which they live; their visions and their powers are limited. — C. Wright Mills

Often a non-Christian knows something about the earth, the heavens, and the other parts of the world, about the motions and orbits of the stars and even their sizes and distances ... and this knowledge he holds with certainty from reason and experience. It is thus offensive and disgraceful for an unbeliever to hear a Christian talk nonsense about such things, claiming that what he is saying is based in Scripture. We should do all that we can to avoid such an embarrassing situation, which people see as ignorance in the Christian and laugh to scorn. — Saint Augustine

Men are from Mars and women from Venus. Kids arrive when orbits collide. — Shikha Kaul

Bodies like the earth are not made to move on curved orbits by a force called gravity; instead, they follow the nearest thing to a straight path in a curved space, which is called a geodesic. A geodesic is the shortest (or longest) path between two nearby points. — Stephen Hawking

A genuine smile involves two facial muscles: (1) the zygomatic major muscle, which stretches from the cheekbone and lifts the corners of the mouth; and (2) the outer part of the obicularis oculi muscle, which orbits the eye, and is involved in "pulling down the eyebrows and the skin below the eyebrows, pulling up the skin below the eye, and raising the cheeks."7 Artificial smiles involve only the zygomatic major. — Daniel H. Pink

In spaces too small for light
to crawl I'll hide everything I own.
I'll keep you there for safety.
I'll build a shelter for your
fears. I'll be your own
suicide bomber, a
satellite in the
dwindling
orbits, a
mortal
Om. — Eric Gamalinda

20% of Americans think that the sun orbits around the Earth. — Na

For his part, Jazz knew he was handsome. It had nothing to do with looking in the mirror, which he rarely did. It had everything to do with the way the girls at school looked at him, the way they became satellites when he walked by, their orbits contorted by his own mysterious gravity. If attention could be measured like the Doppler effect, girls would show a massive blue shift in his presence. In the last year or so, he had even remarked the scrutiny of older women - teachers, cashiers at stores, the woman who delivered UPS packages to his house. What had once been a maternal flavor in their glances had taken on a lingering, cool sort of appraisal. He could almost hear them thinking, Not yet. But soon.
Despite his upbringing, despite the infamy of his father, they still watched him. Or maybe because of it. Maybe Howie was right about bad boys. — Barry Lyga

Maybe that's what growing up means, in the end - you go far enough in the direction of - somewhere - and you realise that you've neutered the capacity of the term home to mean anything. [ ... ] We don't get an endless number of orbits away from the place where meaning first arises, that treasure-house of first experiences. What we learn, instead, is that our adventures secure us in our isolation. Experience revokes our licence to return to simpler times. Sooner or later, there's no place remotely like home. — Gregory Maguire

This success permits us to hope that after thirty or forty years of observation on the new Planet [Neptune], we may employ it, in its turn, for the discovery of the one following it in its order of distances from the Sun. Thus, at least, we should unhappily soon fall among bodies invisible by reason of their immense distance, but whose orbits might yet be traced in a succession of ages, with the greatest exactness, by the theory of Secular Inequalities.
[Following the success of the confirmation of the existence of the planet Neptune, he considered the possibility of the discovery of a yet further planet.] — Urbain Le Verrier

Aristotle thought the earth was stationary and that the sun, the moon, the planets, and the stars moved in circular orbits about the earth. — Stephen Hawking

And it came to me then. That we were wonderful traveling companions but in the end no more than lonely lumps of metal in their own separate orbits. From far off they look like beautiful shooting stars, but in reality they're nothing more than prisons, where each of us is locked up alone, going nowhere. When the orbits of these two satellites of ours happened to cross paths, we could be together. Maybe even open our hearts to each other. But that was only for the briefest moment. In the next instant we'd be in absolute solitude. Until we burned up and became nothing. — Haruki Murakami

The first man-made satellite to orbit the earth was named Sputnik. The first living creature in space was Laika. The first rocket to the Moon carried a red flag. The first photograph of the far side of the Moon was made with a Soviet camera. If a man orbits the earth this year his name will be Ivan. — John F. Kennedy

Let our government be like that of the solar system. Let the general government be like the sun and the states the planets, repelled yet attracted, and the whole moving regularly and harmoniously in several orbits. — John Dickinson

Long ago when a child lay in a manger, a special star appeared. It didn't just show up that evening. It had to have been placed in its orbit centuries before in a trajectory that would make it appear at that special moment of time to announce the birth of a special child. Just as there is divine design in the universe, so each of us has been placed in our own orbits in this life to love, to serve, to help light the world. — Neal A. Maxwell

Alice's illness had turned her into the center of mass around which the rest of the family moved in anxious orbits, like unstable planets. — Lisa Kleypas

I introduce the subject of fine structure with a mini-calendar of events. ...

Winter 1914-15. Sommerfeld computes relativistic orbits for hydrogen-like atoms. Pashcen, aware of these studies, carefully investigates fine structures, ....

January 6, 1916. Sommerfeld announces his fine structure formula, citing results to be published by Paschen in support of his answer.

February 1916. Einstein to Sommerfeld: "A revelation!"

March 1916. Bohr to Sommerfeld: "I do not believe ever to have read anything with more joy than your beautiful work."

September 1916. Paschen publishes his work, acknowledging Sommerfeld's "indefatigable efforts. — Abraham Pais

Etho thought about the last ten orbits of the sun and looked at Guude, "I should have stayed in the forest. — Stampy Miner

The density of space junk peaks around 620 miles up, in the middle of so-called low-Earth orbit. That's bad, because many weather, scientific, and reconnaissance satellites circle in various low-Earth orbits. — Sam Kean

Like celestial bodies, transiting in their orbits, exerting their influences. — Scott Lynch

For who brooded over the meaninglessness of life anymore? Teenagers. They were the only ones who were preoccupied with existential issues, and as a result there was something puerile and immature about them, and hence it was doubly impossible for adults with their sense of propriety intact to deal with them. However, this is not so strange for we never feel more strongly and passionately about life than in our teenage years, when we step into the world for the first time, as it were, and all our feelings are new feelings. So there they are, with their big ideas on small orbits, looking this way and that for an opportunity to launch them, as the pressure builds. And who is it they light upon sooner or later but Uncle Dostoevsky. — Karl Ove Knausgard

Persons with any weight of character carry, like planets, their atmospheres along with them in their orbits. — Thomas Hardy

We are all orbits of some sort,
circling around the world we call our own,
and literature...
Literature is a compass; — Thabo Jijana

I am not the Juliet to his Romeo.
I am not the lodestar around which he orbits.
I am not the trade wind by which he sets the course of his sails.
I am not essential or exceptional.

I was his Monday girl.
Shitty, really, since he was my whole damn week. — Julie Johnson

Some things, like the orbits of the planets, can be calculated far into the future. But that's atypical. In most contexts, there is a limit. Even the most fine-grained computation can only forecast British weather a few days ahead. There are limits to what can ever be learned about the future, however powerful computers become. — Martin Rees

A well-known scientist (some say it was Bertrand Russell) once gave a public lecture on astronomy. He described how the earth orbits around the sun and how the sun, in turn, orbits around the center of a vast collection of stars called our galaxy. At the end of the lecture, a little old lady at the back of the room got up and said: "What you have told us is rubbish. The world is really a flat plate supported on the back of a giant tortoise." The scientist gave a superior smile before replying, "What is the tortoise standing on." "You're very clever, young man, very clever," said the old lady. "But it's turtles all the way down! — Anonymous

The media thinks that only the cutting edge of science, the very latest controversies, are worth reporting on. How often do you see headlines like 'General Relativity still governing planetary orbits' or 'Phlogiston theory remains false'? By the time anything is solid science, it is no longer a breaking headline. — Eliezer Yudkowsky

We've fallen into a trap of ever-widening orbits of contact, and there is a total disregard for the present moment. — Jerry Seinfeld

Solid human being, moving in and out of the orbits of others. — Kate Morton

Science literacy is being plugged into the forces that power the universe. There is no excuse for thinking that the Sun, which is a million times the size of Earth, orbits Earth. — Neil DeGrasse Tyson

Our Father doesn't want us to move on, "maturing" past his Son. In point of fact, our Father is intent that we recognize that he has ordered his universe so that it revolves around his beloved One-not around ourselves, our desires, or even our good works done in his name. So, let me ask you: Is he the supremely honored center of your being? Is he the incomparable, unparalleled, unrivaled sun around whom your life orbits? — Elyse M. Fitzpatrick

Their path to advancement might look less like a straight line and more like some of the pressure distributions and orbits they plotted, but they were determined to take a seat at the table. — Margot Lee Shetterly

Arnold Sommerfeld generalized Bohr's model to include elliptical orbits in three dimensions. He treated the problem relativistically (using Einstein's formula for the increase of mass with velocity), ... According to historian Max Jammer, this success of Sommerfeld's fine-structure formula "served also as an indirect confirmation of Einstein's relativistic formula for the velocity dependence of inertia mass. — Stephen G. Brush

Man and the earth move in orbits: what they did before, they will do again. — Austin O'Malley

Human relations just are not fixed in their orbits like the planets
they're more like galaxies, changing all the time, exploding into light for years, then dying away. — May Sarton

It's crazy, that the defining moment of your life can be nothing to someone else. Like an infatuation, an unrequited love, every bit of you is drawn to it, orbits that heaviness at the center of your universe, everything you think and feel revolving around it and yet, nobody knows. Even the one who caused it. Especially the one who caused it. — Leah Raeder

For if there were a list of cosmic things that unite us, reader and writer, visible as it scrolled up into the distance, like the introduction to some epic science-fiction film, then shining brightly on that list would be the fact that we exist in a financial universe that is subject to massive gravitational pulls from states. States tug at us. States bend us. And, tirelessly, states seek to determine our orbits. — Mohsin Hamid

It will be possible in a few more years to build radio controlled rockets which can be steered into such orbits beyond the limits of the atmosphere and left to broadcast scientific information back to the Earth. A little later, manned rockets will be able to make similar flights with sufficient excess power to break the orbit and return to Earth. (1945) [Predicting communications satellites.] — Arthur C. Clarke

Do you see those dull stars?" She outlined the formation with her finger.
"A pentagram," whispered Scott.
"Yes, but not just any pentagram. Take a look through the telescope."
Scott approached the eyepiece.
"They're not stars!"
"What do they look like?" asked Jenn.
Scott studied each of the figures.
"It can't be," he stuttered. "Planets?"
"Exactly what I thought."
"But how? They're completely off their orbits."
"The earth's off its axis."
"Mount Etna erupted."
"Greece had a earthquake."
"The whole universe has gone mad!" Scott exclaimed.
"And my friends have supernatural powers," said Jenn. — Katie Mattie

Sometimes it feels like I have so much to say, yet none of the ability to actually articulate it. So I remain silent, a quiet observer of human life as it orbits around me, so bright and fascinating. It catches right in my lungs, this need to express myself, and burns like a river of fire up to my vocal chords, stunting everything that's inside, struggling to break out.
Florence Vaine, A Vision of Green — L. H. Cosway

Death was silence, loss, guilt. And anger. But life led that way, anyway. From birth, it was a slow, long march to the grave. Who said that? She couldn't remember now. But it was true. They were born dying. If they were very lucky, the dying was called aging. They reached toward if as if they were satellites in unstable orbits. And then when they got there, they were just dead. One moment in time separated the living from the ghosts. — Michelle Sagara West

To my great surprise, Twitter is not housed in a silver pod that orbits Earth at supersonic speeds, vacuuming up and then dispersing digital bits of worldwide chitchat; it's in a big, bland office building in downtown San Francisco, near a bowling alley and an Old Navy. — Susan Orlean

The thing about Memphis is that it's pleasingly off-kilter. It's a great big whack job of a city. The anti-Atlanta. You go there, and you can't believe the things people will say, the way they think, the wobbling orbits of their lives. There's an essential otherness. — Hampton Sides

To me, however, the question of the times resolved itself into a practical question of the conduct of life. How shall I live? We are incompetent to solve the times. Our geometry cannot span the huge orbits of the prevailing ideas, behold their return, and reconcile their opposition. We can only obey our own polarity. — Ralph Waldo Emerson

The people beneath the pendulum were in their own orbits of bliss or grief, which Shawna did not want to invade. Instead she made her way upstairs, reading the inscriptions that caught her eye, moved by the sheer accumulation of loss. Grief-fiti. That's what it was. — Armistead Maupin

Because our tragedy is that we diverge as countrymen further and further away from one another, like a space ship broken apart in flight which now drifts mournfully in isolated orbits, satellites to each other, planets none, communications faint. — Norman Mailer

I need you to love me the same way
the moon orbits around the earth,
without intention to stop.

"Confessing the heart — Alaska Gold

If the joy of scientific discovery is one-shot per discovery, then, from a fun-theoretic perspective, Newton probably used up a substantial increment of the total Physics Fun available over the entire history of Earth-originating intelligent life. That selfish bastard explained the orbits of planets and the tides. — Eliezer Yudkowsky

It is not known why motorists, who sing the joys of the open road, spend so much petrol every week-end grinding their way to Southend and Brighton and Margate, in the stench of each other's exhausts, one hand on the horn and one foot on the brake, their eyes starting from their orbits in the nerve-racking search for cops, corners, blind turnings, and cross-road suicides. — Dorothy L. Sayers

There's a large cluster of stars that are orbiting the center of our galaxy. And by measuring the motion of stars, and in particular, their orbits, we can figure out whether or not there's a central black hole. — Andrea M. Ghez

You have waited for me past the orbits of Mars and Jupiter, past each of Saturn's rings. It's ridiculous, so stupid, I know, to cross the entire solar system just to hear you and Galina butcher Tchaikovsky. If ever there was an utterance of perfection, it is this. If God has a voice, it is ours. — Anthony Marra

Knowledge was always the power that kept the Universe in its place and the stars turning in their orbits. — Paulo Coelho

When you can dump a load of bricks on a corner lot, and let me watch them arrange themselves into a house - when you can empty a handful of springs and wheels and screws on my desk, and let me see them gather themselves together into a watch - it will be easier for me to believe that all these thousands of worlds could have been created, balanced, and set to moving in their separate orbits, all without any directing intelligence at all. — Bruce Barton

The Total Perspective Vortex derives its picture of the whole Universe on the principle of extrapolated matter analyses.To explain - since every piece of matter in the Universe is in some way affected by every other piece of matter in the Universe, it is in theory possible to extrapolate the whole of creation - every sun, every planet, their orbits, their composition and their economic and social history from, say, one small piece of fairy cake. The man who invented the Total Perspective Vortex did so basically in order to annoy his wife. — Douglas Adams

The same thing is to be understood of all bodies, revolved in any orbits. They all endeavour to recede from the centres of their orbits, and were it not for the opposition of a contrary force which restrains them to and detains them in their orbits, which I therefore call Centripetal, would fly off in right lines with a uniform motion. — Isaac Newton

Man is at the mercy of events. Life is a perpetual succession of events, and we must submit to it. We never know from what quarter the sudden blow of chance will come. Catastrophe and good fortune come upon us and then depart, like unexpected visitors. They have their own laws, their own orbits, their own gravitational force, all independent of man. — Victor Hugo

Chance orbits Hunter like the planets orbit the sun, aching to be closer but never daring. — Kelley York

Kepler's laws, although not rigidly true, are sufficiently near to the truth to have led to the discovery of the law of attraction of the bodies of the solar system. The deviation from complete accuracy is due to the facts, that the planets are not of inappreciable mass, that, in consequence, they disturb each other's orbits about the Sun, and, by their action on the Sun itself, cause the periodic time of each to be shorter than if the Sun were a fixed body, in the subduplicate ratio of the mass of the Sun to the sum of the masses of the Sun and Planet; these errors are appreciable although very small, since the mass of the largest of the planets, Jupiter, is less than 1/1000th of the Sun's mass. — Isaac Newton

Ancient philosophies were entranced by the order of the cosmos; they marveled at the mysterious power that kept the heavenly bodies in their orbits and the seas within bounds and that ensured that the earth regularly came to life again after the dearth of winter, and they longed to participate in this richer and more permanent existence. They expressed this yearning in terms of what is known as the perennial philosophy, so called because it was present, in some form, in most premodern cultures.11 Every single person, object, or experience was seen as a replica, a pale shadow, of a reality that was stronger and more enduring than anything in their ordinary experience but that they only glimpsed in visionary moments or in dreams. By ritually imitating what they understood to be the gestures and actions of their celestial alter egos - whether gods, ancestors, or culture heroes - premodern folk felt themselves to be caught up in their larger dimension of being. — Karen Armstrong

I am unable to believe in a God susceptible to prayer. I simply haven't the nerve to imagine a being, a force, a cause which keeps the planets revolving in their orbits, and then suddenly stops in order to give me a bicycle with three speeds. — Quentin Crisp

This is very American, too - the insecurity about whether we have earned our happiness. Planet Advertising in America orbits completely around the need to convince the uncertain consumer that yes, you have actually warranted a special treat. This Bud's for You! You Deserve a Break Today! Because You're Worth It! You've Come a Long Way, Baby! And the insecure consumer thinks, Yeah! Thanks! I AM gonna go buy a six-pack, damn it! Maybe even two six-packs! And then comes the reactionary binge. Followed by the remorse. Such advertising campaigns would probably not be as effective in the Italian culture, where people already know that they are entitled enjoyment in this life. The reply in Italy to "You Deserve a Break Today" would probably be, Yeah, no duh. That's why I'm planning on taking a break at noon, to go over to you house and sleep with your wife. — Elizabeth Gilbert

A rock or stone is not a subject that, of itself, may interest a philosopher to study; but, when he comes to see the necessity of those hard bodies, in the constitution of this earth, or for the permanency of the land on which we dwell, and when he finds that there are means wisely provided for the renovation of this necessary decaying part, as well as that of every other, he then, with pleasure, contemplates this manifestation of design, and thus connects the mineral system of this earth with that by which the heavenly bodies are made to move perpetually in their orbits. — James Hutton

Men go forth to marvel at the height of mountains, and the huge waves of the sea, the broad flow of the rivers, the vastness of the ocean, the orbits of the stars, and yet they neglect to marvel at themselves. Variant: Men go abroad to admire the heights of mountains, the mighty billows of the sea, the broad tides of rivers, the compass of the ocean, and the circuits of the stars, and pass themselves by. — Saint Augustine

The star S0-2 orbits around Sgr A* every 16 years and will go through its closest approach in 2018. That's an opportunity to test Einstein's General Relativity theory through very precise measurements of this star's short period orbit. — Andrea M. Ghez

What an awful thing then, being there in our house together with our daughter gone, trying to be equal to so many sudden orders of sorrow, any one of which alone would have wrenched us from our fragile orbits around each other. — Paul Harding

they say we're losing centimetres
every year; as if we were
a beach that's losing
ground with every salt advance

the night is overcast
but why not try, at least,
to touch the things our orbits
cannot hold, while there's time
while we can. — Andrew McMillan

I live my life in growing orbits which move out over this wondrous world, I am circling around God, around ancient towers and i have been circling for a thousand years. And I still dont know if I am an eagle or a storm or a great song. — Rainer Maria Rilke

Without any doubt, the regularity which astronomy shows us in the movements of the comets takes place in all phenomena. The trajectory of a simple molecule of air or vapour is regulated in a manner as certain as that of the planetary orbits; the only difference between them is that which is contributed by our ignorance. Probability is relative in part to this ignorance, and in part to our knowledge. — Pierre-Simon Laplace

Since every piece of matter in the Universe is in some way affected by every other piece of matter in the Universe, it is in theory possible to extrapolate the whole of creation - every sun, every planet, their orbits, their composition and their economic and social history from, say, one small piece of fairy cake. — Douglas Adams

Glance at your watch. What time is it? It's five o'clock as I write this. What does that mean, anyhow? Even if time passes slowly, it will soon be five o'clock again in another part of the world. What is this fascination all about? In reality, it's just a way to measure the revolving earth - tilted at a peculiar angle of 23 degrees - as it orbits a gigantic Sun. That's it. I've nailed it. Time's just a blue dot moving through an infinite space. The world revolves without us so why take this Earth time so personally? — M.P. Neary

They lived the slow and invisible interpenetration of their universes, like two stars gravitating around a common axis, in ever tighter orbits, whose clear destiny is to coalesce at some point in space and time. — Paolo Giordano

The Silverbird was tracking the Raiel's gas giant-sized DF spheres as they continued their flight across the star system. Gravity waves spilled out from them with astonishing force, distorting the orbits within the main asteroid rings. A couple of small moons caught in the backwash had also changed inclination. All nine of the DFs were heading in towards the small orange star which Centurion Station's never-named planet was in orbit around. As the ship watched, the photosphere started to dim. — Peter F. Hamilton

The Earth orbits round tables. — Ljupka Cvetanova

But very small things could be a big deal within the very small orbits on which they spin. — Shanthi Sekaran