Quotes from Galileo Galilei

This vain presumption of understanding everything can have no other basis than never understanding anything.

THERE is certainly something very noble and large-minded in the intention of those who have endeavoured to protect from envy the noble achievements of distinguished men, and to rescue their names, worthy of immortality, from oblivion and decay.

Y sin embargo, se mueve! (Eppur si muove)

Mathematics is the alphabet with which God has written the universe.

The nature of the human mind is such that unless it is stimulated by images of things acting upon it from without, all remembrance of them passes easily away.

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

(T)he increase of known truths stimulates the investigation, establishment, and growth of the arts.

Wine is sunlight, held together by water.

The Milky Way is nothing else but a mass of innumerable stars planted together in clusters.

Who would set a limit to the mind of man? Who would dare assert that we know all there is to be known?

It vexes me when they would constrain science by the authority of the Scriptures, and yet do not consider themselves bound to answer reason and experiment.

What has philosophy got to do with measuring anything? It's the mathematicians you have to trust, and they measure the skies like we measure a field.

All truths are easy to understand once they are discovered; the point is to discover them.

Two truths cannot contradict one another.

Holy Scripture could never lie or err...its decrees are of absolute and inviolable truth.

See now the power of truth.

See now the power of truth; the same experiment which at first glance seemed to show one thing, when more carefully examined, assures us of the contrary.

Philosophy is written in this grand book, the universe, which stands continually open to our gaze. But the book cannot be understood unless one first learns to comprehend the language and read the letters in which it is composed.

It was granted to me alone to discover all the new phenomena in the sky and nothing to anybody else. This is the truth which neither envy nor malice can supress.

I do not feel obligated to believe that the same God who has endowed us with sense, reasons, and intellect has intended us to forgo their use.

You cannot teach a man anything; you can only help him discover it in himself.

Philosophy is written in this grand book - I mean the Universe - which stands continually open to our gaze, but it cannot be understood unless one first learns to comprehend the language and interpret the characters in which it is written. It is written in the language of mathematics, and its characters are triangles, circles and other geometrical figures, without which it is humanly impossible to understand a single word of it

Facts which at first seem improbable will, even on scant explanation, drop the cloak which has hidden them and stand forth in naked and simple beauty.

And who can doubt that it will lead to the worst disorders when minds created free by God are compelled to submit slavishly to an outside will? When we are told to deny our senses and subject them to the whim of others? When people devoid of whatsoever competence are made judgesover experts and are granted authority to treat them as they please?These are the novelties which are apt to bring about the ruin ofcommonwealths and the subversion of the state.