A Quote by Harlow Shapley

It seems to me that the evidence ... is opposed to the view that the spirals are individual galaxies comparable with our own. In fact, there appears as yet no reason for modifying the tentative hypothesis that the spirals are not composed of typical stars at all, but are truly nebulous objects.

Harlow Shapley

Quote Topics

Appears Comparable Composed Evidence Fact Galaxies Hypothesis In Fact Individual Me Modifying No Reason Objects Opposed Our Own Reason Seems Spirals Stars Truly Typical View

Quote Author

Harlow Shapley
American - Astronomer
November 2, 1885 - October 20, 1972

The evidence at present available points strongly to the conclusion that the spirals are individual galaxies, or island universes, comparable with our own galaxy in dimension and in number of component units. [Stating his conviction on the nature of nebulae during the Shapley-Curtis debate on 26 Apr 1920 to the National Academy of Sciences.]

Heber Doust Curtis

Pick up a pinecone and count the spiral rows of scales. You may find eight spirals winding up to the left and 13 spirals winding up to the right, or 13 left and 21 right spirals, or other pairs of numbers. The striking fact is that these pairs of numbers are adjacent numbers in the famous Fibonacci series

Stuart Kauffman

The most mortifying fact of my life is something that happened when I was fourteen and I have never admitted to anyone: not to friends nor therapists; not even in rehab when we were detailing our own personal spirals of shame did I confess. It is this: I am a graduate of the Barbizon School of Modeling.

Augusten Burroughs

Beneficent spirals, operating by benign feedback, mean that everything needful is not required at once: each individual improvement is beneficial for the whole

Jane Jacobs

Assurance, action, and evidence influence each other in an ongoing process. This helix is like a coil, and as it spirals upward it expands and widens. These three elements of faith - assurance, action, and evidence - are not separate and discrete; rather, they are interrelated and continuous and cycle upward.

David A. Bednar

The great spirals... apparently lie outside our stellar system.

Edwin Powell Hubble

The great spirals, with their enormous radial velocities and insensible proper motions, apparently lie outside our Solar system.

Edwin Powell Hubble

We do NOT know the past in chronological sequence. It may be convenient to lay it out anesthetized on the table with dates pasted on here and there, but what we know we know by ripples and spirals eddying out from us and from our own time.

Ezra Pound

And when you look along the way we've come, there are spirals of vultures wheeling.

Bruce Chatwin

The farther we get from God, the more the world spirals out of control.

Billy Graham

The whole universe is based on rhythms. Everything happens in circles, in spirals.

John Hartford

I destroy because for me everything that proceeds from reason is untrustworthy. I believe only in the evidence of what stirs my marrow, not in the evidence of what addresses itself to my reason. I have found levels in the realm of the nerve. I now feel capable of evaluating the evidence. There is for me an evidence in the realm of pure flesh which has nothing to do with the evidence of reason. The eternal conflict between reason and the heart is decided in my very flesh, but in my flesh irrigated by nerves.

Antonin Artaud

Understanding the history of matter and searching for its most interesting forms, such as galaxies, stars, planets and life, seems a suitable use for our intelligence.

Robert Kirshner

The universe is composed of subjects to be communed with, not objects to be exploited. Everything has its own voice. Thunder and lightening and stars and planets, flowers, birds, animals, trees, ~~ all these have voices, and they constitute a community of existence that is profoundly related.