A Quote by Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

I had rather be Mercury, the smallest among seven [planets], revolving round the sun, than the first among five [moons] revolving round Saturn.

Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

Quote Topics

Among First Five Had Mercury Planets Rather Revolving Round Saturn Seven Smallest Sun Than

Quote Author

Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
German - Novelist
August 28, 1749 - March 22, 1832

The same Being that fashioned the insect, whose existence is only discerned by a microscope, and gave that invisible speck a system of ducts and other organs to perform its vital functions, created the enormous mass of the planet thirteen hundred times larger than our earth, and launched it in its course round the sun, and the comet, wheeling with a velocity that would carry it round our globe in less than two minutes of time, and yet revolving through so prodigious a space that it takes near six centuries to encircle the sun!

Henry Brougham, 1st Baron Brougham and Vaux

The sun, with all those planets revolving around it and dependent on it, can still ripen a bunch of grapes as if it had nothing else in the universe to do.

Galileo Galilei

Why must women stay quietly? Why must we be little moons, each of us stuck in our little orbit, revolving around a planet that is some man? Why can't we be other planets? Why must we be moons?

Loretta Chase

I like to think that we’re revolving on this planet and revolving through the galaxy. I love having context that’s so much bigger than I can fathom. It’s fantastic to realise how insignificant you are.

Benedict Cumberbatch

I am among those who firmly believe that a round of golf should not take more than three and a half hours, four at most. Anything longer than that is not a round of golf, it's life in Albania.

Dan Jenkins

I'm a fan of the planets in any combination. When I was born, Mercury, Venus, Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, Neptune, Pluto, the Sun, and the Moon were all in the sky.

Neil deGrasse Tyson

The force that keeps the planets revolving around the sun would be glad to handle the circumstances of your life, if only you would ask him to.

Marianne Williamson

You can, if you wish, think of it like the universe: Each case is a sun, and all the judges, lawyers and administrative personnel represent planets revolving around the case in fixed orbit, never getting closer.

Sol Wachtler

The word 'revolution' first brings to mind violent upheavals in the state, but ideas of revolution in science, and of political revolution, are almost coeval. The word once meant only a revolving, a circular return to an origin, as when we speak of revolutions per minute or the revolution of the planets about the sun.

Ian Hacking

The mass starts into a million suns; Earths round each sun with quick explosions burst, And second planets issue from the first.

Erasmus Darwin

But what exceeds all wonders, I have discovered four new planets and observed their proper and particular motions, different among themselves and from the motions of all the other stars; and these new planets move about another very large star [Jupiter] like Venus and Mercury, and perchance the other known planets, move about the Sun. As soon as this tract, which I shall send to all the philosophers and mathematicians as an announcement, is finished, I shall send a copy to the Most Serene Grand Duke, together with an excellent spyglass, so that he can verify all these truths.

Galileo Galilei

And the seasons they go 'round and 'round And the painted ponies go up and down We're captive on the carousel of time We can't return we can only look behind From where we came And go round and round and round In the circle game.

Joni Mitchell

Geology ... offers always some material for observation. ... [When] spring and summer come round, how easily may the hammer be buckled round the waist, and the student emerge from the dust of town into the joyous air of the country, for a few delightful hours among the rocks.

Archibald Geikie

The following passage is one of those cited by Copernicus himself in his preface to De Revolutionibus: "The Syracusan Hicetas, as Theophrastus asserts, holds the view that the heaven, sun, moon, stars, and in short all of the things on high are stationary, and that nothing in the world is in motion except the earth, which by revolving and twisting round its axis with extreme velocity produces all the same results as would be produced if the earth were stationary and the heaven in motion. . . ."

Marcus Tullius Cicero

Our best shot at finding life in our solar system might be to look at the moons of Jupiter and Saturn. Mars, increasingly, looks like a dead planet. But the oceans beneath the ice cover of the moons of Jupiter and Saturn may actually have more liquid water than the oceans of Earth.