Top 99 Quotes & Sayings by Johannes Kepler

I demonstrate by means of philosophy that the earth is round, and is inhabited on all sides; that it is insignificantly small, and is borne through the stars.

Planets move in ellipses with the Sun at one focus.

The squares of the periodic times are to each other as the cubes of the mean distances.

I much prefer the sharpest criticism of a single intelligent man to the thoughtless approval of the masses.

The radius vector describes equal areas in equal times.

Nature uses as little as possible of anything.

The diversity of the phenomena of nature is so great, and the treasures hidden in the heavens so rich, precisely in order that the human mind shall never be lacking in fresh nourishment.

Truth is the daughter of time, and I feel no shame in being her midwife.

...Those laws are within the grasp of the human mind. God wanted us to recognize them by creating us after his own image so that we could share in his own thoughts... and if piety allow us to say so, our understanding is in this respect of the same kind as the divine, at least as far as we are able to grasp something of it in our mortal life.

The roads by which men arrive at their insights into celestial matters seem to me almost as worthy of wonder as those matters in themselves.

Without proper experiments I conclude nothing.

I am a Lutheran astrologer, I throw away the nonsense and keep the hard kernel.

Great is God our Lord, great is His power and there is no end to His wisdom. Praise Him you heavens, glorify Him, sun and moon and you planets. For out of Him and through Him, and in Him are all things..... We know, oh, so little. To Him be the praise, the honor and the glory from eternity to eternity.

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 in your ineffable language! Praise Him, celestial harmonies, and all ye who can comprehend them! And thou, my soul, praise thy Creator! It is by Him and in Him that all exist.

The heavenly motions... are nothing but a continuous song for several voices, perceived not by the ear but by the intellect, a figured music which sets landmarks in the immeasurable flow of time.

Geometry is the archetype of the beauty of the world.

My aim is to say that the machinery of the heavens is not like a divine animal but like a clock (and anyone who believes a clock has a soul gives the work the honour due to its maker) and that in it almost all the variety of motions is from one very simple magnetic force acting on bodies, as in the clock all motions are from a very simple weight.

We do not ask what hope of gain makes a little bird warble, since we know that it takes delight in singing because it is for that very singing that the bird was made, so there is no need to ask why the human mind undertakes such toil in seeking out these secrets of the heavens. ... And just as other animals, and the human body, are sustained by food and drink, so the very spirit of Man, which is something distinct from Man, is nourished, is increased, and in a sense grows up on this diet of knowledge, and is more like the dead than the living if it is touched by no desire for these things.

If my false figures came near to the facts, this happened merely by chance ... These comments are not worth printing. Yet it gives me pleasure to remember how many detours I had to make, along how many walls I had to grope in the darkness of my ignorance until I found the door which lets in the light of the truth ... In such manner did I dream of the truth.

Since we astronomers are priests of the highest God in regard to the book of nature, it befits us to be thoughtful, not of the glory of our minds, but rather, above all else, of the glory of God.

Ships and sails proper for the heavenly air should be fashioned. Then there will also be people, who do not shrink from the dreary vastness of space.

After the birth of printing books became widespread. Hence everyone throughout Europe devoted himself to the study of literature... Every year, especially since 1563, the number of writings published in every field is greater than all those produced in the past thousand years. Through them there has today been created a new theology and a new jurisprudence; the Paracelsians have created medicine anew and the Copernicans have created astronomy anew. I really believe that at last the world is alive, indeed seething, and that the stimuli of these remarkable conjunctions did not act in vain.

The heavenly bodies are nothing but a continuous song for several voices (perceived by the intellect, not by the ear); a music which... sets landmarks in the immeasurable flow of time. It is therefore, no longer surprising that man, in imitation of his creator, has at last discovered the art of figured song, which was unknown to the ancients. Man wanted to reproduce the continuity of cosmic time... to obtain a sample test of the delight of the Divine Creator in His works, and to partake of his joy by making music in the imitation of God.

Eyesight should learn from reason.

If the earth should cease to attract its waters to itself all the waters of the sea would be raised and would flow to the body of the moon.

[God] is the kind Creator who brought forth nature out of nothing.

The Earth is round, and is inhabited on all sides, is insignificantly small, and is borne through the stars.

My greatest desire is that I may perceive the God whom I find everywhere in the external world, in like manner also within and inside myself.

I had the intention of becoming a theologian...but now I see how God is, by my endeavors, also glorified in astronomy, for 'the heavens declare the glory of God.'

It is a right, yes a duty, to search in cautious manner for the numbers, sizes, and weights, the norms for everything [God] has created. For He himself has let man take part in the knowledge of these things ... For these secrets are not of the kind whose research should be forbidden; rather they are set before our eyes like a mirror so that by examining them we observe to some extent the goodness and wisdom of the Creator.

The chief aim of all investigations of the external world should be to discover the rational order and harmony which has been imposed on it by God and which He revealed to us in the language of mathematics.

Geometry has two great treasures; one is the Theorem of Pythagoras; the other, the division of a line into extreme and mean ratio. The first we may compare to a measure of gold; the second we may name a precious jewel.

When ships to sail the void between the stars have been built, there will step forth men to sail these ships.

O telescope, instrument of much knowledge, more precious than any sceptre!

Astronomy would not provide me with bread if men did not entertain hopes of reading the future in the heavens.

The cause of the six-sided shape of a snowflake is none other than that of the ordered shapes of plants and of numerical constants; and since in them nothing occurs without supreme reason-not, to be sure, such as discursive reasoning discovers, but such as existed from the first in the Creators's design and is preserved from that origin to this day in the wonderful nature of animal faculties, I do not believe that even in a snowflake this ordered pattern exists at random.

In theology we must consider the predominance of authority; in philosophy the predominance of reason.

There will certainly be no lack of human pioneers when we have mastered the art of flight....Let us create vessels and sails justed to the heavenly ether, and there will be plenty of people unafraid of the empty wastes. In the meantime we shall prepare, for the brave sky-travelers, maps of the celestial bodies.

I believe only and alone in the service of Jesus Christ. In him is all refuge and solace.

We find, therefore, under this orderly arrangement, a wonderful symmetry in the universe, and a definite relation of harmony in the motion and magnitude of the orbs, of a kind that is not possible to obtain in any other way.

As soon as somebody demonstrates the art of flying, settlers from our species of man will not be lacking on the moon and Jupiter... Given ships or sails adapted to the breezes of heaven, there will be those who will not shrink from even that vast expanse.

When things are in order, if the cause of the orderliness cannot be deduced from the motion of the elements or from the composition of matter, it is quite possibly a cause possessing a mind.

If God himself has waited six thousand years for someone to contemplate his works, my book can wait for a hundred.

Where there is matter, there is geometry.

Why are things as they are and not otherwise?

Nature loves simplicity and unity.

The Creator, the fountain of all wisdom, the approver of perpetual order, the eternal and superessential spring of geometry and harmonics.

Thus God himself was too kind to remain idle and began to play the game of signatures signing his likeness unto the world: therefore I chance to think that all nature and the graceful sky are symbolized in the art of Geometria.

I measured the skies, now the shadows I measure, Sky-bound was the mind, earth-bound the body rests. [Kepler's epitaph]

Do we ask what profit the little bird hopes for in singing?

Geometry is one and eternal shining in the mind of God

I am stealing the golden vessels of the Egyptians to build a tabernacle to my God from them, far far away from the boundaries of Egypt. If you forgive me, I shall rejoice; if you are enraged with me, I shall bear it. See, I cast the die, and I write the book. Whether it is to be read by the people of the present or of the future makes no difference: let it await its reader for a hundred years, if God himself has stood ready for six thousand years for one to study him.

Wherever there are qualities there are likewise quantities, but not always vice versa.

We do not ask for what useful purpose the birds do sing, for song is their pleasure since they were created for singing. Similarly, we ought not to ask why the human mind troubles to fathom the secrets of the heavens.

God gives every animal the means of saving its life-why object if he gives astrology to the astronomer?

Science is the process of thinking God's thoughts after Him.

Once miracles are admitted, every scientific explanation is out of the question.

Since geometry is co-eternal with the divine mind before the birth of things, God himself served as his own model in creating the world (for what is there in God which is not God?), and he with his own image reached down to humanity.

Just as the eye was made to see colours, and the ear to hear sounds, so the human mind was made to understand, not whatever you please, but quantity.

If there is anything that can bind the heavenly mind of man to this dreary exile of our earthly home and can reconcile us with our fate so that one can enjoy living,-then it is verily the enjoyment of the mathematical sciences and astronomy.