Johannes Kepler Quotes
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Gravity is a mutual affection between cognate bodies towards union or conjunction (similar in kind to the magnetic virtue), so that the earth attracts a stone much rather than the stone seeks the earth.
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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.
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[God] is the kind Creator who brought forth nature out of nothing.
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He who will please the crowd and for the sake of the most ephemeral renown will either proclaim those things which nature does not display or even will publish genuine miracles of nature without regard to deeper causes is a spiritually corrupt person... With the best of intentions I publicly speak to the crowd (which is eager for things new) on the subject of what is to come.
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Once miracles are admitted, every scientific explanation is out of the question.
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Nature loves simplicity and unity.
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...for a long time I wanted to become a theologian... now, however, behold how through my efforts God is being debated in astronomy.
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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.
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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.
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Without proper experiments I conclude nothing.
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If two stones were placed... near each other, and beyond the sphere of influence of a third cognate body, these stones, like two magnetic needles, would come together in the intermediate point, each approaching the other by a space proportional to the comparative mass of the other.
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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.
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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.
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No operation of addition or subtraction gives rise to diversity, but all are equally related to their pair of Terms, or Elements.
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It may be well to wait a century for a reader, as God has waited six thousand years for an observer.
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A most unfailing experience... of the excitement of sublunary (that is, human) natures by the conjunctions and aspects of the planets has instructed and compelled my unwilling belief.
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O telescope, instrument of much knowledge, more precious than any sceptre!
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So long as the mother, Ignorance, lives, it is not safe for Science the offspring, to divulge the hidden causes of things.
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...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.
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The sphere of the attractive virtue which is in the moon extends as far as the earth, and entices up the waters; but as the moon flies rapidly across the zenith, and the waters cannot follow so quickly, a flow of the ocean is occasioned in the torrid zone towards the westward.
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...wheresoever the earth may be placed, or whithersoever it may be carried by its animal faculty, heavy bodies will always be carried towards it.
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The Creator, the fountain of all wisdom, the approver of perpetual order, the eternal and superessential spring of geometry and harmonics.
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I used to measure the Heavens, now I measure the shadows of Earth. The mind belonged to Heaven, the body's shadow lies here.
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Geometry is one and eternal shining in the mind of God. That share in it accorded to humans is one of the reasons that humanity is the image of God.