Quotes from Galileo Galilei

I've loved the stars too fondly to be fearful of the night.

I do not feel obliged to believe that that same God who has endowed us with sense, reason, and intellect has intended us to forego their use.

If I were again beginning my studies, I would follow the advice of Plato and start with mathematics.

I have never met a man so ignorant that I couldn't learn something from him.

Nature is relentless and unchangeable, and it is indifferent as to whether its hidden reasons and actions are understandable to man or not.

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.

But it does move!

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 will of others?

I have never met a man so ignorant that I couldn't learn something from him.

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

In questions of science, the authority of a thousand is not worth the humble reasoning of a single individual.

Passion is the genesis of genius.

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.

It is a beautiful and delightful sight to behold the body of the Moon.

Wine is sunlight, held together by water.

There are those who reason well, but they are greatly outnumbered by those who reason badly.

Long experience has taught me this about the status of mankind with regard to matters requiring thought: the less people know and understand about them, the more positively they attempt to argue concerning them, while on the other hand to know and understand a multitude of things renders men cautious in passing judgment upon anything new.

Mathematics is the language in which God has written the universe

Eppur si muove.

My dear Kepler , what would you say of the learned here, who, replete with the pertinacity of the asp, have steadfastly refused to cast a glance through the telescope? What shall we make of this? Shall we laugh, or shall we cry?

It is surely harmful to souls to make it a heresy to believe what is proved.

By denying scientific principles, one may maintain any paradox.

With regard to matters requiring thought: the less people know and understand about them, the more positively they attempt to argue concerning them.

Names and attributes must be accommodated to the essence of things, and not the essence to the names, since things come first and names afterwards.