"Copernicus" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... knowledge of (158) Sosigenes, a mathematician of Alexandria. The laws of the solar system were still but imperfectly known; the popular belief, that the sun moved round the earth, was universally maintained, and continued until the sixteenth century, when the contrary was proved by Copernicus. There existed many celebrated tracts on mathematics; and several of the mechanical powers, particularly that of the lever, were cultivated with success. The more necessary and useful rules of arithmetic were generally known. The use of the load-stone not being as yet ...
— The Lives Of The Twelve Caesars, Complete - To Which Are Added, His Lives Of The Grammarians, Rhetoricians, And Poets • C. Suetonius Tranquillus
... thought. The fashion of a man's thought may pass away; his knowledge and his ideas may lose their stamp, either because they prove to be false or because they become universally current. Everybody believes Copernicus, but nobody reads him. Yet when a book, no matter how obsolete in thought, is marked by great beauty of style, it lives forever. Consider the case of Sir Thomas Browne. Art ...
— The Advance of English Poetry in the Twentieth Century • William Lyon Phelps
... cite, among those who have wrought strongly upon opinion or practice in science, Aristotle, Plato, Ptolemy, Euclid, Archimedes, Roger Bacon, Copernicus, Francis Bacon, Ramus, Tycho Brahe, Galileo, Napier, Descartes, Leibnitz, Newton, Locke. I take none but names known out of their {6} fields of work; and all were learned as well as sagacious. I have chosen my instances: if ...
— A Budget of Paradoxes, Volume I (of II) • Augustus De Morgan
... knowledge. For in every department of science the great truths which dawn upon the mind are usually attended with a cloud of difficulties, and, but for the habit in question, they would soon be permitted to fade away, and be lost in their original obscurity. Copernicus has, therefore, been justly applauded,(219) not only for conceiving, but for firmly grasping the heliocentric theory of the world, notwithstanding the many formidable objections which it had to encounter ...
— A Theodicy, or, Vindication of the Divine Glory • Albert Taylor Bledsoe
... that education of modern by ancient thought which we call the Renaissance, it was the words of Aristotle which sent Columbus sailing to the New World, while a fragment of Pythagorean astronomy set Copernicus thinking on that train of reasoning which has revolutionised the whole position of our planet in the universe. Then it was seen that the only meaning of progress is a return to Greek modes of thought. The ...
— Selected Prose of Oscar Wilde - with a Preface by Robert Ross • Oscar Wilde
... to be so numerous that every new writer finds himself compelled to modify it in some manner with a view to cover those exceptions, might not another, of the differences consist in its furnishing laws as universally true as are those of Copernicus, Kepler, or Newton—laws that gave proof of their truth by being everywhere in harmony with each other, and productive everywhere of harmony; and would not the following form ...
— The trade, domestic and foreign • Henry Charles Carey
... to the dishonored remnants of the Ptolemaic theory, and scouted the philosophy of Copernicus which she vehemently averred was not worth "a pinch of snuff," else the water in the well would surely run out once in every twenty-four hours. Now, as she dived into the depths of her stocking-basket, collecting the socks neatly darned and rolled over each other, her ...
— Vashti - or, Until Death Us Do Part • Augusta J. Evans Wilson
... never appreciated the mathematics as the basis of physics, but valued their elements mainly as a mental discipline. Astronomy meant little to him, since he failed to connect it directly with human well-being and improvement; to the system of Copernicus, the beginning of our insight into the heavens, he was hostile, or at least indifferent; and the splendid discoveries successively made by Tycho Brahe, Galileo, and Kepler, and brought to his ears while the 'Great Instauration' filled ...
— Library Of The World's Best Literature, Ancient And Modern, Vol 3 • Various
... light here in India, and not in Greece or Italy, whither it was brought by Pythagoras after he had studied under the Indian Gymnosophists. And most certainly this great philosopher—who revealed to the world the heliocentric system before Copernicus and Galileo—knew better than anyone else how dependent are the least sounds in nature on Akasha and its interrelations. One of the four Vedas, namely, the Sama-Veda, entirely consists of hymns. This is a collection of mantrams sung during the sacrifices to the gods, that is to say, to the ...
— From the Caves and Jungles of Hindostan • Helena Pretrovna Blavatsky
... them. My loving, heretic mother loved them not; my father, a Catholic born and bred, had an equal aversion. They had persecuted his gods—the thinkers, philosophers, and scientific discoverers—Galileo, Bruno, Copernicus; and brought to his mind the cruelties of the Holy Inquisition, the Massacre of St. Bartholomew; and I always pictured them as burning little heretics alive if they had their will—Eton jackets, white chimney-pot ...
— Peter Ibbetson • George du Marier et al
... come to patronize. He had remained to worship. And in after years, when he thought of this new vital force which became part of him that day, it was in the terms of Emerson: "Pythagoras was misunderstood, and Socrates, and Jesus, and Luther, and Copernicus, and Galileo, and Newton, and every pure and wise spirit that ever took flesh. To be great is to ...
— The Crossing • Winston Churchill
... that have been advanced, and in Europe there is now perhaps no one in the learned world so unscholarly as to attach serious signification to it, except for convenient everyday use (as an abbreviation of the means of expression)—thanks chiefly to the Pole Boscovich: he and the Pole Copernicus have hitherto been the greatest and most successful opponents of ocular evidence. For while Copernicus has persuaded us to believe, contrary to all the senses, that the earth does NOT stand fast, Boscovich has taught us to abjure the belief ...
— Beyond Good and Evil • Friedrich Nietzsche
... towered toward heaven, the Sphynx gazed on with calm, earnest eyes, Memnon made music of welcome to the sun, and our token sealed the shrivelled silent lips of the Egyptian. The world emerged from its night. Dante and Aquinas, Copernicus and Galileo, Luther and Melanchthon, Gutenberg and Faust, Kant and Schlegel, Bacon, Leibnitz and Newton, Watt and Morse, tore away the seals before our token saw the light. It came forth into a new world by the hand of a missionary, preaching a religion ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol. 6, No. 6, December 1864 - Devoted To Literature And National Policy • Various
... however, was very much interested in mathematics and in the natural sciences, and we have many wonderful suggestions from his pen. He was the first, for instance, to suggest, more than a century before Copernicus, that the earth was not the centre of the universe, and that it would not be absolutely at rest or, as he said, devoid of all motion. His words are: "Terra igitur, quae centrum esse nequit, motu omni carere non potest." He described very clearly how the ...
— Old-Time Makers of Medicine • James J. Walsh
... and took her position at the instrument. Saint Simeon Stylites the Younger explained the wonders of the moon to her,—Tycho and the grooves radiating from it, Kepler and Copernicus with their craters and ridges, and all the most brilliant shows of this wonderful little world. I thought he was more diffuse and more enthusiastic in his descriptions than he had been with the older members of the party. I don't doubt the old gentleman who ...
— The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr. (The Physician and Poet not the Jurist)
... Galileo, Copernicus, Newton, and John Brown have to wait the calmer judgments of future generations. These men believed that God sent them to do a certain work—to reveal a hidden truth; to pour light into the minds of benighted and superstitious men. They completed ...
— History of the Negro Race in America from 1619 to 1880. Vol. 2 (of 2) - Negroes as Slaves, as Soldiers, and as Citizens • George Washington Williams
... truth, though he could not establish it, in the third century B.C. But Greek science had been forgotten in an age which knew no Greek; and it was not till after Erasmus' death that an obscure canon in a small Prussian town near Danzig—Nicholas Copernicus, 1473-1543—found out anew the secret of the world. This fruit of long cold watches on the tower of his church he printed with full demonstration, but he scarcely dared to publish the book: indeed a perfect copy only reached him a few days before his death. Even ...
— The Age of Erasmus - Lectures Delivered in the Universities of Oxford and London • P. S. Allen
... time of Thales of Miletus, in the fifth century B.C., down to that of Copernicus in the fifteenth and Tycho Brahe in the sixteenth century A.D., observations have been from time to time carried on with more or less correctness, until in the present day the altitudes of the lunar mountains have been determined with exactitude. Galileo explained the phenomena of ...
— Jules Verne's Classic Books • Jules Verne
... very different being from the dreamy and backward youth described for us by the candid friends of his schooldays. A dreamer, indeed, he always was, but he had learned from Bishop Butler, whom he reverenced profoundly and spoke of as "the Copernicus of ethics," that there is no practice more fatal to moral strength than dreaming divorced from action. Some concrete act, some definite thing to be done, was now always in his mind, but always, it may be added, as the realisation ...
— Thomas Davis, Selections from his Prose and Poetry • Thomas Davis
... the moon's face appears variegated with dusky patches, while a few points of superior brilliance shine amid the brighter portions, especially in the southern and eastern quarters, where immense craters like Tycho and Copernicus are visible to a keen eye, gleaming like polished buttons. With a telescope, even of moderate power, the surface of the moon presents a scene of astonishing complexity, in which strangeness, beauty, and grandeur are all combined. The half of the moon turned ...
— Other Worlds - Their Nature, Possibilities and Habitability in the Light of the Latest Discoveries • Garrett P. Serviss
... shoots of imagination, of fancy, of "sentiment." Well, at what date was modern science born? At what date philosophy? Does philosophy date from Kant, or from Bacon, or from Plato? Does modern science begin with Darwin, with Newton, with Copernicus, or with Aristotle? Let us, for argument's sake, accept the common account that the age par excellence of science and philosophy began in England, in France, in Germany, somewhere about the end of the seventeenth century. Since that time we have doubtless discovered and elaborated many a detail. ...
— Platform Monologues • T. G. Tucker
... Copernicus, who taught that the sun is stationary; that the planets revolve around the sun, and that the apparent revolution of the heavens is caused by the rotation of the earth on its axis,—a system now generally received and acknowledged, was persecuted ...
— Allopathy and Homoeopathy Before the Judgement of Common Sense! • Frederick Hiller
... when the world was imperilled by the treatment accorded to Galileo for believing in the motion of the earth; and though 69 years of age he was cast, by the tools of Vatican, into a dungeon, where he lost his sight and ultimately his life; and Copernicus was facing the same fate, for accomplishing a noble astronomical discovery; and Martin Luther was persecuted by the Roman Catholic church, for trying to bring the people nearer to God. The Greeks, a brave people, ...
— Conversion of a High Priest into a Christian Worker • Meletios Golden
... literature, sought refuge in Europe, and the vigorous brain of the young nations brooded over the ancient speculations, just as the vigorous young brain of Greece had done two thousand years before. Copernicus (1473-1543) acknowledges that he found the secret of the movements of the heavenly bodies in the speculations of the old Greek thinkers. Galilei (1564-1642) enlarged the Copernican system with ...
— The Story of Evolution • Joseph McCabe
... 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 conspicuous and strange defect for a man ...
— Bacon - English Men Of Letters, Edited By John Morley • Richard William Church
... believed to be fastened was—quite consistently—assigned to some of these beings. As long as such notions were in operation, not only were there no grounds for denying the reality of the pagan gods, but there was every reason to assume it. So far we may rightly say that it was Copernicus, Galileo, Giordano Bruno, Kepler and Newton that did away with the traditional conception of ...
— Atheism in Pagan Antiquity • A. B. Drachmann
... "Exercitatio" displays no trace of being influenced by Bacon's work. After glancing at the superstitious 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
... attitude of the thoughtful mind toward life, and prepared the way for new lines of thought and new accomplishments in the world of philosophy and science. Through the scientific discoveries of Galileo and Copernicus and exploration of Columbus, brought about largely by the influence of humanistic studies, were wrought far-reaching consequences in the thought of the age. And finally the scholars of Italy not only threw off scholasticism but also disengaged themselves from the domineering ...
— History of Human Society • Frank W. Blackmar
... make the theory peculiar to myself, ignoring the fact that the author, or rather restorer, of the doctrine was Nicholas Copernicus, a Catholic, and a much-esteemed priest, who was summoned to Rome to correct the ecclesiastic calendar, and in the course of his inquiries reached this view ...
— The Worlds Greatest Books, Volume XIII. - Religion and Philosophy • Various
... habitually conceive the phenomenon otherwise than as the ascent or descent of the sun. Assuredly no one can do so without a prolonged trial; and it is probably not easier now than in the first generation after Copernicus. Mr. Spencer does not say, "In looking at sunrise it is impossible not to conceive that it is the sun which moves, therefore this is what every body believes, and we have all the evidence for it that we can have for any truth." Yet this would be an exact parallel to his ...
— A System Of Logic, Ratiocinative And Inductive • John Stuart Mill
... to predict what matrimonial caprice may or may not seize even the wisest, most experienced, most practical, and reasonable of men; and I would sooner undertake to conjecture how high the thermometer stands at this instant on the crest of Mount Copernicus up yonder in the moon, than attempt to guess what freak will decide a man's ...
— St. Elmo • Augusta J. Evans
... adult. Among their publications were, besides the original writings of Peretz, Taviov, Frischman, Berdichevsky, Chernikhovsky, and others, also translations from Bogrov, Byron, Frug, Hugo, Nordau, Shakespeare, Spencer, Zangwill, Zola, critical biographies of Aristotle, Copernicus, George Eliot, Heine, Lassalle, Nietzsche, Rousseau, and a great many equally famous men of letters, which followed each other in promiscuous but uninterrupted succession, all handsomely printed and prettily bound, and sold at a ...
— The Haskalah Movement in Russia • Jacob S. Raisin
... But there was nothing. Copernicus and Kepler lay in full sunlight. The heights of the lunar mountains, the depths of the barren, empty seas were etched black and white, clear and clean. Grim, forbidding desolation, this unchanging Moon. In romance, moonlight may shimmer and sparkle to light a lover's smile; but the reality of ...
— Brigands of the Moon • Ray Cummings
... next reviewed the battle between science and theology on the subjects of the "earth's shape, surface, and relations," "the position of the earth among the heavenly bodies," in which Copernicus and Galileo struggled so bravely and successfully ...
— Scientific American, Vol.22, No. 1, January 1, 1870 • Various
... a corporation, it is admission as an employee. In each case we present the qualifications of the following at college age: Thomas Edison, Michael Faraday, Nicholai Tesla, James Watt, Heinrich Hertz, Kepler, Copernicus, Galileo, and Henry Ford. The admissibility of this group of the world's scientific and the inventive leaders is shown here." Baker pointed to a minute dab of red ...
— The Great Gray Plague • Raymond F. Jones
... the system of Astronomy which prevailed during the Middle Ages, and was only discredited at an epoch nearly simultaneous with that of the discovery of the New World by Columbus. The true arrangement of the solar system was then expounded by Copernicus in the great work to which he devoted his life. The first principle established by these labours showed the diurnal movement of the heavens to be due to the rotation of the earth on its axis. Copernicus pointed out the fundamental difference between real motions and apparent ...
— The Story of the Heavens • Robert Stawell Ball |
