"Ptolemaic" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... from her daughter-in-law, whom she detested; ignorant of the fact that the sun which she regarded as a dazzling yellow fire was by bolometric measures shown to be in reality of a restful, and refreshing blue color. By the time I was fully convinced that teleology was as dead as the Ptolemaic theory, and that 'wings were not planned for flight, but that flight has produced wings', hence that Haeckel's gospel of 'Dysteleology' or purposelessness in Nature satisfactorily explained creation—a great wave of oriental ...
— At the Mercy of Tiberius • August Evans Wilson
... let me compare the advance of knowledge among mankind to the course taken by a planet. The false paths on which humanity usually enters after every important advance are like the epicycles in the Ptolemaic system, and after passing through one of them, the world is just where it was before it entered it. But the great minds, who really bring the race further on its course do not accompany it on the epicycles it makes from time to time. This explains why posthumous fame is ...
— The Essays of Arthur Schopenhauer; Religion, A Dialogue, Etc. • Arthur Schopenhauer
... and a son who was yet a child. This son was properly the heir to the crown. Physcon himself, being a brother, had no claim, as against a son. The name of the queen was Cleopatra. This was, in fact, a very common name among the princesses of the Ptolemaic line. Cleopatra, besides her son, had a daughter, who was at this time a young and beautiful girl. Her name was also Cleopatra. She was, of course, the niece, as her mother was the sister, ...
— Cleopatra • Jacob Abbott
... infinite space, and peopled it with an infinite number of stars, and in the attraction of gravity they discovered the universal law of motion in the firmament. Thus all the mythical representations of the system of the world, whether Aristotelian, Ptolemaic, or Biblical, vanished for ever, and the great zoomorphic body of the universe was dissolved; to be replaced by worlds circulating in infinite space, subject to the laws of number and ...
— Myth and Science - An Essay • Tito Vignoli
... of the universe, The Ptolemaic, held by all the schools, May yet be proven false. We yet may find This earth of ours is not the sovran lord Of all those wheeling spheres. Ourselves have marked Movements among the planets that forbid Acceptance of it wholly. Some of these Are moving round the sun, if ...
— Watchers of the Sky • Alfred Noyes
... possessing sufficient force to throw such masses to a distance, according to their own theory, of between 200,000 and 300,000 miles; and this through regions, the nature of which is wholly unknown. This hypothesis cannot be maintained according to the Ptolemaic system; indeed, it is in ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine - Volume 54, No. 338, December 1843 • Various
... the fifteenth century many men had thought it possible to reach India by sailing around Africa. Since classical times geographers had both asserted and denied the possibility. During the Middle Ages the Ptolemaic theory was in the ascendant; but the observations of thirteenth-century travelers gave powerful support to the ideas of Eratosthenes. Europeans who had sailed from Malacca to Hormos, or had read the book ...
— Beginnings of the American People • Carl Lotus Becker
... of a few volumes of theological casuistry, and her Highness never opens a book unless it be to scandalise her husband by reading some prohibited pamphlet from France. The University, since the fall of the Jesuits, has been in charge of the Barnabite order, and, for aught I know, the Ptolemaic system is still taught there, together with the dialectic of Aristotle. As to science, it is anathema; and the press being subject to the restrictions of the Holy Office, and the University closed to modern thought, but few scholars are to be found in the duchy, save those ...
— The Valley of Decision • Edith Wharton
... astronomy, except of some meagre ideas derived through the Arabs from the Ptolemaic system, and Mr. Newbold, after most painstaking research, failed to discover any regular treatise on astronomy, though Arabic and Hindu tracts on interpretations of dreams, horoscopes, spells, propitious and unpropitious moments, auguries, talismans, ...
— The Golden Chersonese and the Way Thither • Isabella L. Bird (Mrs. Bishop)
... changes pass without violence, by reason of the two cardinal conditions of boundless space and boundless time. Geology has initiated us into the secularity of nature, and taught us to disuse our dame-school measures, and exchange our Mosaic[501] and Ptolemaic schemes[502] for her large style. We know nothing rightly, for want of perspective. Now we learn what patient periods must round themselves before the rock is formed, then before the rock is broken, and the first lichen race has disintegrated ...
— Essays • Ralph Waldo Emerson
... Sacred Theory of the Universe. The early Church's conviction of the uselessness of astronomy The growth of a sacred theory—Origen, the Gnostics, Philastrius, Cosmas, Isidore The geocentric, or Ptolemaic, theory, its origin, and its acceptance by the Christian world Development of the new sacred system of astronomy—the pseudo-Dionysius, Peter Lombard, Thomas Aquinas Its popularization by Dante Its details Its persistence to ...
— History of the Warfare of Science with Theology in Christendom • Andrew Dickson White
... think essential for our soul's safety. But mistakes like these are hurtful only when persisted in in the face of fuller truth, after truth has been discovered. Only a very foolish man would now uphold the Ptolemaic astronomy. But the Ptolemaic astronomy, when first invented, was based on real if incomplete observations, and formed a groundwork without which further progress in that science would have been probably impossible. The theories and ceremonials ...
— Short Studies on Great Subjects • James Anthony Froude |
