Meet
Galileo Galilei

“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 is written in the language of mathematics.”

— The Assayer

“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.”

— Letter to the Grand Duchess Christina

“For in the sciences the authority of thousands of opinions is not worth as much as one tiny spark of reason in an individual man.”

— Dialogue Concerning the Two Chief World Systems, Day 1

“Nature is inexorable and immutable; she never transgresses the laws imposed upon her, or cares a whit whether her abstruse reasons and methods of operation are understandable to men.”

— Letter to the Grand Duchess Christina

“To command the professors of astronomy to confute their own observations is to enjoin an impossibility, for it is to command them not to see what they do see, and not to understand what they do understand.”

— Letter to the Grand Duchess Christina

“It is a most beautiful and delightful sight to behold the body of the Moon, distant from us almost sixty earthly radii, as near as if it were at a distance of only two such measures.”

— Sidereus Nuncius

“I think that in discussions of physical problems we ought to begin not from the authority of scriptural passages, but from sense-experiences and necessary demonstrations.”

— Letter to the Grand Duchess Christina

“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.”

— Dialogue Concerning the Two Chief World Systems, Day 2

“There is not a single effect in nature, even the least that exists, such that the most ingenious theorists can arrive at a complete understanding of it.”

— Dialogue Concerning the Two Chief World Systems, Day 1

“My dear Kepler, what will you say of the learned here, who, replete with the pertinacity of the asp, have steadfastly refused to cast a glance through the telescope?”

— Letter to Johannes Kepler, 1610

“I would say here something that was heard from an ecclesiastic of the most eminent degree: That the intention of the Holy Ghost is to teach us how one goes to heaven, not how heaven goes.”

— Letter to the Grand Duchess Christina

“By denying scientific principles, one may maintain any paradox.”

— Dialogue Concerning the Two Chief World Systems, Day 2

“We must say that there are as many squares as there are numbers.”

— Discourses and Mathematical Demonstrations Relating to Two New Sciences, First Day

“He who looks the higher is the more highly distinguished, and turning over the great book of nature is the way to elevate one's mind.”

— Dialogue Concerning the Two Chief World Systems, Dedication