Zitat des Tages von Galileo Galilei:
It is surely harmful to souls to make it a heresy to believe what is proved.
I notice that young men go to the universities in order to become doctors or philosophers or anything, so long as it is a title, and that many go in for those professions who are utterly unfit for them, while others who would be very competent are prevented by business or their daily cares, which keep them away from letters.
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.
Nature is relentless and unchangeable, and it is indifferent as to whether its hidden reasons and actions are understandable to man or not.
The Bible shows the way to go to heaven, not the way the heavens go.
We must say that there are as many squares as there are numbers.
If I were again beginning my studies, I would follow the advice of Plato and start with mathematics.
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.
I think that in the discussion of natural problems we ought to begin not with the Scriptures, but with experiments, and demonstrations.
The Milky Way is nothing else but a mass of innumerable stars planted together in clusters.
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.
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.
Where the senses fail us, reason must step in.
I have never met a man so ignorant that I couldn't learn something from him.
In questions of science, the authority of a thousand is not worth the humble reasoning of a single individual.
And yet it moves.
By denying scientific principles, one may maintain any paradox.
We cannot teach people anything; we can only help them discover it within themselves.
Measure what is measurable, and make measurable what is not so.
All truths are easy to understand once they are discovered; the point is to discover them.