"Kepler" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... the mistakes of his predecessors has taught him the value of caution in interpreting phenomena that seem to fall outside the range of such laws of nature as experience has seemed to demonstrate. Again and again the old metaphysical laws have been forced aside by observation; as, for example, when Kepler showed that the planetary orbits are not circular, and Galileo's telescope proved that the spot-bearing sun cannot be a perfect body in ...
— A History of Science, Volume 5(of 5) - Aspects Of Recent Science • Henry Smith Williams
... See Kepler struggling with poverty and hardship, his books burned in public by order of the state, his library locked up by the Jesuits, and himself exiled by public clamor. For seventeen years he works calmly upon the demonstration of the great principles ...
— Pushing to the Front • Orison Swett Marden
... real scientists of his age were discovering secrets in the only sure way, of hard, self-denying work. Gilbert was studying magnetism, Harvey discovering the circulation of the blood, Kepler determining the laws that govern the planets' motions, Napier inventing logarithms, and Galileo standing in ecstasy beneath the first telescope ever pointed ...
— Outlines of English and American Literature • William J. Long
... entry. "'Inter Jovem et Martem planetam interposui,'" he read. He scratched his head. "That's Latin, and it's famous, too. Kepler wrote it, back before the asteroids were discovered. 'Between Jupiter and Mars I will put ...
— Gold in the Sky • Alan Edward Nourse
... multitudes who daily perish in this manner to attest a philosophical truth, and whose bodies the unreasoning wave casts sullenly upon our thankless shores, have a truer claim to be called the martyrs of science than a Galileo or a Kepler. To use Kossuth's eloquent phrase, they are the unnamed ...
— A Tangled Tale • Lewis Carroll
... reverence for the "Baconian Induction," he pointed out Bacon's ignorance of the progress of science up to his time, and his inability to divine the importance of what he knew by hearsay of the work of Copernicus, or Kepler, or Galileo; of Gilbert, his contemporary, or of Galen; and wound up by quoting Ellis's severe judgment of Bacon in the General Preface to the Philosophic Works, in Spedding's classical edition ...
— The Life and Letters of Thomas Henry Huxley Volume 2 • Leonard Huxley
... few dates: In 1612, Galileo and Kepler were still living. Thirty years were yet to lapse before the birth of Newton. Modern astronomy was in its tenderest infancy, and remained the privilege of a few initiated persons.—C.E. Guillaume, in ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 810, July 11, 1891 • Various
... instrument of discovery, which, by augmenting the optic power of the eye, enables it to penetrate beyond the apparent phenomena, and to discern the true constitution of the heavenly bodies, was wanting at Uranienburg. The observations of Tycho as discussed by Kepler, conducted that most fervid, powerful, and sagacious mind to the discovery of some of the most important laws of the celestial motions; but it was not till Galileo, at Florence, had pointed his telescope to the sky, that the Copernican system could be said to ...
— The Uses of Astronomy - An Oration Delivered at Albany on the 28th of July, 1856 • Edward Everett
... analogy which these contrasted regions present to the land and water surfaces of our globe, he suspected that the former are represented on the moon by the brighter and more rugged, and the latter by the smoother and more level areas; a view, however, which Kepler more distinctly formulated in the dictum, "Do maculas esse Maria, do lucidas esse terras." Besides making a rude lunar chart, he estimated the heights of some of the ring- mountains by measuring the distance from the terminator of their bright summit peaks, when they were either coming into or ...
— The Moon - A Full Description and Map of its Principal Physical Features • Thomas Gwyn Elger
... word evolution itself, and the establishment of the general evolutionary theory as a system of philosophy applicable to the entire universe, we owe to one man alone—Herbert Spencer. Many other minds—from Galileo and Copernicus, from Kepler and Newton, from Linnaeus and Tournefort, from D'Alembert and Diderot, nay, even, in a sense, from Aristotle and Lucretius—had been piling together the vast collection of raw material from which that ...
— Falling in Love - With Other Essays on More Exact Branches of Science • Grant Allen
... about my bed; but I regarded him nothing at all: when afterwards I began to slumber, then he kept such a racket and rumbling upon the chamber stairs, as if many empty barrels and hogsheads had been tumbled down." Kepler, whose name is immortalized by being associated with the laws he discovered that regulate the orbits of the heavenly bodies, was a zealous advocate of astrology; and his great predecessor and master, the Prince of Astronomers, as he is called, Tycho Brahe, kept an idiot in his presence, ...
— Salem Witchcraft, Volumes I and II • Charles Upham
... has somewhere described with great humour the 'dreadfully painful' manner in which Kepler made his celebrated calculations and discoveries; but our young men of talent fail to see the joke, and take no pleasure in such anecdotes. Truth, they feel, is not to be had from them on any such terms. And why should it be? Is it not notorious ...
— Obiter Dicta • Augustine Birrell
... view of nature which came through the scientific discoveries of the age. Bacon, Copernicus, Kepler, Galileo, Gassendi, Newton, are the fathers of the modern sciences. These are the men who brought new worlds to our knowledge and new methods to our use. That the sun does not move about the earth, that the earth is but a speck in space, that heaven cannot be ...
— Edward Caldwell Moore - Outline of the History of Christian Thought Since Kant • Edward Moore
... persons:[609] Theodore Beza, Isaac Casaubon, Sir Philip Sidney, Earl of Essex, Lord Bacon, Sir Walter Raleigh, John Milton, Sir Henry Vane, Isaac Walton, Dr. Donne, Abraham Cowley, Berlarmine, Charles Cotton, John Pym, John Hales, Kepler, Vieta, Albericus Gentilis, Paul Sarpi, Arminius; with all of whom exists some token of his having communicated, without enumerating many others, whom doubtless[610] he saw,—Shakspeare, Spenser, Jonson, Beaumont, Massinger, two ...
— Essays • Ralph Waldo Emerson
... have a glorious question to wrestle with today; that of Kepler's three laws, which, when explored by the calculus, are to show me the fundamental mechanism of the heavenly bodies. One of them says: 'The area swept out in a given time by the radius vector of the path of a planet is proportional to the ...
— The Life of the Fly - With Which are Interspersed Some Chapters of Autobiography • J. Henri Fabre
... Kepler the first regular lines of the universe began to be discerned. When Nature yielded to Newton her great secret, Gravitation was felt to be not greater as a fact in itself than as a revelation that Law was fact. ...
— Natural Law in the Spiritual World • Henry Drummond
... he may see the phenomena of sleep solved in a copper-plate engraving, with all the figures into which the globules of the blood shaped themselves, and the results demonstrated by mathematical calculations. In short, from the time of Kepler(3) to that of Newton, and from Newton to Hartley, not only all things in external nature, but the subtlest mysteries of life and organization, and even of the intellect and moral being, were conjured within the magic circle of ...
— Hints towards the formation of a more comprehensive theory of life. • Samuel Taylor Coleridge
... gifts, he possessed a strength and range of vision that were perfectly surprising. He enjoyed, in common with Moestlin, Kepler's professor, the rare faculty of distinguishing the satellites of Jupiter with the naked eye, and of counting fourteen of the stars in the group of Pleiades, the remotest of them being only of the ninth magnitude. He presumed ...
— Five Weeks in a Balloon • Jules Verne
... geography, [Footnote: Physical Geography, in opposition to Political.] chemistry, or natural history. He talked satisfactorily, in his very worst state, of the gases, and stated very accurately different propositions of Kepler's, especially the law of the planetary motions. And I remember in particular, that upon the very last Monday of his life, when the extremity of his weakness moved a circle of his friends to tears, and ...
— Narrative And Miscellaneous Papers • Thomas De Quincey
... localities, in Kepler, Galileo, Newton, Tycho, Descartes, Sir Walter Scott, and Captain Cook, ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction - Vol. 20, Issue 558, July 21, 1832 • Various
... rising? The solar system has been known a long while; it is taught in the humblest schools, and no longer surprises any one. But those who found out, after long efforts, what we learn without trouble, the discoverers, reckoned their discoveries very surprising. Kepler, one of the founders of modern astronomy, in the book to which he consigned his immortal discoveries, exclaims:[97] "The wisdom of the Lord is infinite, as are also His glory and His power. Ye heavens! sing His praises. Sun, moon, and planets, glorify Him ...
— The Heavenly Father - Lectures on Modern Atheism • Ernest Naville
... magnitudes, how those of the third magnitude may probably be three times more remote, and the manner in which we represent to ourselves the material arrangement of the starry strata, I have found the following remarkable passage in Kepler's 'Epitome Astronomiae Copernicanae', 1618, t. i., lib. 1, p. 34-39: "Sol hic noster nil aliud est quam una ex fixis, nobis major et clarior visa, quia propior quam fixa. Pone terram stare ad latus, una semi-diametro via e lactea e, tunc ha ec via lactea apparebit circulus parvus, vel ellipsis ...
— COSMOS: A Sketch of the Physical Description of the Universe, Vol. 1 • Alexander von Humboldt
... had any distinct notion of the formation of the pictures of objects on the bottom of the eye; this discovery he published about the year 1600. Joannes Baptista Porta had indeed got some rude notion of it prior to the time of Kepler, but as he knew nothing of the refraction made by the humours of the eye, his doctrine was lame and defective, for he imagines that the images are painted on the surface of ...
— Popular Lectures on Zoonomia - Or The Laws of Animal Life, in Health and Disease • Thomas Garnett
... to the general theory of relativity, which differs of course from the theory of Newton, a small variation from the Newton-Kepler motion of a planet in its orbit should take place, and in such away, that the angle described by the radius sun-planet between one perhelion and the next should exceed that corresponding to one complete revolution by an ...
— Relativity: The Special and General Theory • Albert Einstein
... problems in Euclid. The propositions contained in Euclid he regarded as self-evident; and, without any preliminary study, he made himself master of Descartes' "Geometry" by his genius and patient application. Dr. Wallis's "Arithmetic of Infinites," Sanderson's "Logic," and the "Optics" of Kepler, were among the books which he studied with care; and he is reported to have found himself more deeply versed in some branches of knowledge than the tutor who directed ...
— The World's Greatest Books, Vol IX. • Edited by Arthur Mee and J.A. Hammerton
... physical science and poetry. The secrets of the Universe, the ways of God's working, are surely the highest poetry; but the greater number of scientists have willed a divorce between the material and the spiritual, and decry that very imaginative faculty which, in the case of Kepler, bore such wonderful fruits for science. Facts are very well, and induction is also well, but science requires the aid of the creative and divining imagination to order the details and draw thence the broader and higher generalizations. Let us hope that the good common sense of the in-coming ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol. 5, No. 5, May, 1864 - Devoted To Literature And National Policy • Various
... and smiles incredulously, mentally calling me an old liar, but there are instances in which modesty is superfluous and even dangerous. Yes, this simple and great invention belongs to me, just as Newton's system belongs to Newton, and as Kepler's laws of the revolution of the planets ...
— The Crushed Flower and Other Stories • Leonid Andreyev
... his sum in vulgar fractions. Nobody had helped him; he had found it out for himself; and now he could go out and play. "Let nothing confine me: I will indulge my sacred ecstasy. I will triumph over mankind.... If you forgive me, I rejoice; if you are angry, I cannot help it." In fact, Kepler didn't care ...
— By the Christmas Fire • Samuel McChord Crothers
... possible for us to reduce the law of all progress, above set forth, from the condition of an empirical generalization, to the condition of a rational generalization. Just as it was possible to interpret Kepler's laws as necessary consequences of the law of gravitation; so it may be possible to interpret this law of progress, in its multiform manifestations, as the necessary consequence of some similarly universal principle. As gravitation was assignable as the cause of each of the groups of phenomena ...
— Essays: Scientific, Political, & Speculative, Vol. I • Herbert Spencer
... guesswork, indeed, lies at the foundation of all scientific knowledge. The riddle of the universe, like less important riddles, is unravelled only by approximative trials, and the most brilliant discoverers have usually been the bravest guessers. Kepler's laws were the result of indefatigable guessing, and so, in a somewhat different sense, was the wave-theory of light. But the guesswork of scientific inquirers is very different now from what it was in older times. In the first place, we have slowly learned that a guess must be ...
— The Unseen World and Other Essays • John Fiske
... Tycho received a visit from Kepler, who stayed with him for several months in order that he might carry out some astronomical observations. In the following year Kepler returned, and took up his permanent residence with Tycho, having been appointed assistant ...
— The Astronomy of Milton's 'Paradise Lost' • Thomas Orchard
... their manifold arrangements), has pushed forward, sixty miles (land-marches, south side of the Donau, which makes a bend here), and this day, September 14th, appears at Linz. Pleasant City of Linz; where, as readers may remember, Mr. John Kepler, long ago, busy discovering the System of the World (grandest Conquest ever made, or to be made, by the Sons of Adam), had his poor CAMERA OBSCURA set out, to get himself a livelihood in the interim: here now is Karl Albert's flag on the winds, and, as it were, the Oriflamme with it, on ...
— History of Friedrich II. of Prussia, Vol. XIII. (of XXI.) • Thomas Carlyle
... to him, are—compared with other things—out of his track of inquiry. He had his astronomical theories; he expounded them in his "Descriptio Globi Intellectualis" and his Thema Coeli He was not altogether ignorant of what was going on in days when Copernicus, Kepler, and Galileo were at work. But he did not know how to deal with it, and there were men in England, before and then, who understood much better than he the problems and the methods of astronomy. He had one ...
— Bacon - English Men Of Letters, Edited By John Morley • Richard William Church
... works of KEPLER is preparing in Germany, under the supervision of Prof. FRISCH, of Stuttgart. The manuscripts of the great astronomer, preserved at St. Petersburg, have been examined for the purpose, with rich results. It is also proposed to erect a monument to ...
— The International Monthly Magazine - Volume V - No II • Various
... his mission; old Barbarossa; Leopold's mystery; Conrad and St. Elizabeth; Ptolemy Alphonso; Otto with the arrow; Margaret with the mouth; Sigismund supra grammaticam; Augustus the physically strong; Albert Achilles and Albert Alcibiades; Anne of Cleves; Mr. John Kepler,—who move on the pages, more brightly "pictured" than those of Livy, like marionettes inspired with life. In the main body of the book the men and women of the Prussian court are brought before us in fuller light and shade. Friedrich himself, at Sans Souci, with his ...
— Thomas Carlyle - Biography • John Nichol
... The denomination "physical astronomy," first used by Kepler, and long appropriated to this branch of the science, has of ...
— A Popular History of Astronomy During the Nineteenth Century - Fourth Edition • Agnes M. (Agnes Mary) Clerke
... explain all the motions. And Tycho Brahe, another great astronomer, who did not believe at all in the new ideas of Copernicus, made a number of observations on our near neighbor Mars, to show that Copernicus was wrong. He gave these to Kepler, another great astronomer, enjoining him to explain them in such a way as to overthrow the Copernican ideas. But Kepler behaved like Balaam the son of Beor; for, called on to curse (or at least to denounce) the views of Copernicus, he altogether blessed them three times. ...
— St. Nicholas Magazine for Boys and Girls, Vol. 5, Nov 1877-Nov 1878 - No 1, Nov 1877 • Various
... surface is whitened with something resembling the rays of Tycho, but more irregular in appearance. Copernicus lies within the edge of the great plain named the Oceanus Procellarum, or "Ocean of Storms," and farther east, in the midst of the "ocean," is a smaller crater mountain, named Kepler, which is also enveloped by a whitish area, covering the lunar surface as if it were the result of extensive outflows of ...
— Other Worlds - Their Nature, Possibilities and Habitability in the Light of the Latest Discoveries • Garrett P. Serviss
... the theory is applied to Newton's Laws of Motion and Kepler's Laws, and is found to harmonize with all the results given by these laws. Such a result is a distinct advance on the application of a frictionless aether to solar and stellar phenomena, as it is impossible ...
— Aether and Gravitation • William George Hooper
... independently of any desire on the part of the animal (much as we have lately seen that the moons of Mars were on the point of being discovered three hundred years ago, merely through Galileo sending to Kepler a Latin anagram which Kepler could not understand, and arranged into the line—"Salve umbistineum geminatum Martia prolem," and interpreted to mean that Mars had two moons, whereas Galileo had meant to say "Altissimum planetam tergeminum observavi," ...
— Life and Habit • Samuel Butler
... whose discoveries make him the great predecessor of Kepler and Newton, did not come from a noble family, as certain other early astronomers have done, for his father was a tradesman. Chroniclers are, however, careful to tell us that one of his uncles was a bishop. We are not acquainted with any of those ...
— Great Astronomers • R. S. Ball
... The noble words of Kepler rang a ceaseless silvery chime in her soul, and while they sustained and strengthened her, she sought to mould her life in harmony with their ...
— St. Elmo • Augusta J. Evans
... without experiment and observation: so said Aristotle, so said Bacon, so acted Copernicus, Tycho Brahe,[116] Gilbert, Kepler, Galileo, Harvey, etc., before Bacon wrote.[117] No derived knowledge until experiment and observation are concluded: so said Bacon, and no one else. We do not mean to say that he laid down his principle ...
— A Budget of Paradoxes, Volume I (of II) • Augustus De Morgan
... to leave, with an indignant joy, the miseries of a world which his talents might have illustrated and his virtues adorned. Such things have been and will be. But surely in that better life which good men dream of, the spirit of a Kepler or a Milton will find a more propitious destiny.' Conway's ...
— Life Of Johnson, Vol. 1 • Boswell
... of Kepler's third law, the author says, "And even those extraordinary objects, the revolving double stars, are subject to the same controlling law." Since Kepler's third law expresses a relationship between the motions of three bodies, two of which revolve around a third much larger than either, ...
— Atlantic Monthly Vol. 6, No. 33, July, 1860 • Various
... with no more rapid acceleration than that with which it approaches, it would take too long to reach the nearest planet, but the maximum repulsion being at the start by reason of its proximity to the earth—for apergy, being the counterpart of gravitation, is subject to Newton's and Kepler's laws—the acceleration of a body apergetically charged will be greatest at first. Two inclined planes may have the same fall, but a ball will reach the bottom of one that is steepest near the top in less time than on any other, because the maximum acceleration is ...
— A Journey in Other Worlds • J. J. Astor
... then, but laughter and jesting? Nay, it was the Advent of Reason. By means of Kepler, of Galileo, Descartes, Newton, there was now triumphantly enthroned the reasonable dogma of faith in the unchangeable laws of nature. Miracle dared no longer show itself, or, when it did dare, was hissed down. In other and better words, the fantastic ...
— La Sorciere: The Witch of the Middle Ages • Jules Michelet
... had little air or water outside, one knew, too, that it was sister planet to the earth, and that it was unaccountable that it should be different in composition. The inference that it was hollowed out was as clear as day. And yet one never saw it as a fact. Kepler, of course—" ...
— The First Men In The Moon • H. G. Wells
... of our race drew some of their best means of intellectual discipline from the study of the ellipse. Then came a new era in the history of this curve. Hitherto it had been an abstract form, a geometrical speculation. But Kepler, by some fortunate guess, was led to examine whether the orbits of the planets might not be elliptical, and, lo! it was found that this curve, whose beauty had so fascinated so many men for so many ages, had been deemed by the great Architect of the ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 5, No. 30, April, 1860 • Various
... Wren had many years before endeavored to explain the planetary motions "by the composition of a descent toward the sun, and an impressed motion; but he at length gave it over, not finding the means of doing it." In January, 1683-1684, Dr. Halley had concluded from Kepler's law of the periods and distances, that the centripetal force decreased in the reciprocal proportion of the squares of the distances, and having one day met Sir Christopher Wren and Dr. Hooke, the latter affirmed that he had demonstrated upon that principle all the laws of the celestial ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Volume 12 • Editor-In-Chief Rossiter Johnson
... the prolonged application of the Greek intellect to the laws of conic sections. Whether we think of bridges or projectiles, of the curves of ships, or of the rules of navigation, we must think of conic sections. The rules of navigation, for instance, are in part based on astronomy. Kepler's Laws are foundation stones of that science, but Kepler discovered that Mars moves in an ellipse round the sun in one of the foci by a deduction from conic sections.... Yet the historical fact is that these conic sections were studied as an abstract science for eighteen centuries before they ...
— Human Traits and their Social Significance • Irwin Edman |
