The motions of the comets are exceedingly regular, and they observe the same laws as the motions of the planets, but they differ from the motions of vortices in every particular and are often contrary to them.

The most remarkable discovery in all of astronomy is that the stars are made of atoms of the same kind as those on the earth.

What do I care about Jupiter? Justice is a human issue, and I do not need a god to teach it to me.

The centre of the system of the world is immovable.

Space is almost infinite. As a matter of fact, we think it is infinite.

And yet it moves.

Up until the 1920s, everyone thought the universe was essentially static and unchanging in time.

Where there is an observatory and a telescope, we expect that any eyes will see new worlds at once.

I was born on January 8, 1942, exactly three hundred years after the death of Galileo. I estimate, however, that about two hundred thousand other babies were also born that day. I don’t know whether any of them was later interested in astronomy.

Most people have no concept of how an automatic transmission works, yet they know how to drive a car. You don’t have to study physics to understand the laws of motion to drive a car. You don’t have to understand any of this stuff to use Macintosh.

Space is big. You just won’t believe how vastly, hugely, mind-bogglingly big it is. I mean, you may think it’s a long way down the road to the drug store, but that’s just peanuts to space.

Cosmology is a rapidly advancing field.

There could be shadow galaxies, shadow stars, and even shadow people.

It is clear to everyone that astronomy at all events compels the soul to look upwards, and draws it from the things of this world to the other.

The moon and other celestial bodies should be free for exploration and use by all countries. No country should be permitted to advance a claim of sovereignty.

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.

Astronomy compels the soul to look upwards and leads us from this world to another.

I came in with Halley’s Comet in 1835. It is coming again next year, and I expect to go out with it. It will be the greatest disappointment of my life if I don’t go out with Halley’s Comet. The Almighty has said, no doubt: ‚Now here are these two unaccountable freaks; they came in together, they must go out together.‘

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.

I create stars.

Space has always fascinated me. As a young boy looking up at the stars, I found it impossible to resist thinking what was out there and if I ever would experience space first-hand.

The same law takes place in a system, consisting of many bodies, as in one single body, with regard to their persevering in their state of motion or of rest. For the progressive motion, whether of one single body or of a whole system of bodies, is always to be estimated from the motion of the center of gravity.

The cosmos is about the smallest hole that a man can hide his head in.

The motions which the planets now have could not spring from any natural cause alone, but were impressed by an intelligent Agent.

It’s been said that astronomy is a humbling and, I might add, a character-building experience.

I put up my thumb and it blotted out the planet Earth.

The universe is a big place, perhaps the biggest.

In less than a hundred years, we have found a new way to think of ourselves. From sitting at the center of the universe, we now find ourselves orbiting an average-sized sun, which is just one of millions of stars in our own Milky Way galaxy.

If the stars should appear but one night every thousand years how man would marvel and stare.

What goes on inside a star is better understood than one might guess from the difficulty of having to look at a little dot of light through a telescope, because we can calculate what the atoms in the stars should do in most circumstances.

There are no black holes in the sense of regimes from which light can’t escape to infinity.

Even Hubble hasn’t found yet the end of this universe, and we don’t know that it has any end.

This most beautiful system of the sun, planets, and comets, could only proceed from the counsel and dominion of an intelligent and powerful Being.

There is nothing bigger or older than the universe.

Superstition is to religion what astrology is to astronomy the mad daughter of a wise mother. These daughters have too long dominated the earth.

The moon gravitates towards the earth and by the force of gravity is continually drawn off from a rectilinear motion and retained in its orbit.

I can find in my undergraduate classes, bright students who do not know that the stars rise and set at night, or even that the Sun is a star.

The smaller the planets are, they are, other things being equal, of so much the greater density; for so the powers of gravity on their several surfaces come nearer to equality. They are likewise, other things being equal, of the greater density, as they are nearer to the sun.

I got into science fiction by being interested in astronomy first.

It is the stars, The stars above us, govern our conditions.

Land on Mars, a round-trip ticket – half a million dollars. It can be done.

The Milky Way is nothing else but a mass of innumerable stars planted together in clusters.

Poets say science takes away from the beauty of the stars – mere globs of gas atoms. I, too, can see the stars on a desert night, and feel them. But do I see less or more?

You teach your daughters the diameters of the planets and wonder when you are done that they do not delight in your company.

For NASA, space is still a high priority.

Science sent the Hubble telescope out into space, so it could capture light and the absence thereof, from the very beginning of time. And the telescope really did that. So now we know that there was once absolutely nothing, such a perfect nothing that there wasn’t even nothing or once.