"Copernicus" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... this towards the south-west you will see the most majestic formation to be found upon the moon—the great ring-plain called 'Copernicus,' after the founder of our present system of astronomy. It is about sixty miles in diameter, only roughly circular in shape, and as it stands isolated upon the great ocean-bed it is most favourably situated for observation. A large number of very high ridges, ...
— To Mars via The Moon - An Astronomical Story • Mark Wicks
... was not included among the accepted theories of Copernicus, passed away, Haggerty sat up and rubbed the swelling over his ear, tenderly yet grimly. Next, he felt about the floor for his pocket-lamp. A strange spicy dust drifted into his nose and throat, making ...
— The Voice in the Fog • Harold MacGrath
... Paolo Toscanelli, Luca Pacioli and Leonardo da Vinci, held incomparably the highest place among European nations in mathematics and the natural sciences, and the learned men of every country, even Regiomontanus and Copernicus, confessed themselves its pupils. This glory survived the Counter-reformation, and even today the Italians would occupy the first place in this respect if circumstances had not made it impossible for the greatest minds to ...
— The Civilization of the Renaissance in Italy • Jacob Burckhardt
... For a college, it is admission as a student. For a corporation, it is admission as an employee. In each case we present the qualifications of the following at college age: Thomas Edison, Michael Faraday, Nicholai Tesla, James Watt, Heinrich Hertz, Kepler, Copernicus, Galileo, and Henry Ford. The admissibility of this group of the world's scientific and the inventive leaders is shown here." Baker pointed to a minute dab ...
— The Great Gray Plague • Raymond F. Jones
... with sacred lore, Mosaic dreams in Genesis explore, Doat with Copernicus, or darkling stray With Newton, Ptolemy, or Tycho Brahe! To you I sing not, for I sing of truth, Primeval systems, and creation's youth; Such as of old, with magic wisdom fraught, Inspired LUCRETIUS to the ...
— Rejected Addresses: or, The New Theatrum Poetarum • James and Horace Smith
... Copernicus, who taught that the sun is stationary; that the planets revolve around the sun, and that the apparent revolution of the heavens is caused by the rotation of the earth on its axis,—a system now generally received and acknowledged, was persecuted nearly to death. I found, only twenty years ...
— Allopathy and Homoeopathy Before the Judgement of Common Sense! • Frederick Hiller
... laid by Hipparchus, gave to astronomy the form in which it was taught throughout the Middle Ages. We shall next see the mighty revolution in our conceptions of the universe which are associated with the name of Copernicus. We then pass to those periods illumined by the genius of Galileo and Newton, and afterwards we shall trace the careers of other more recent discoverers, by whose industry and genius the boundaries of human knowledge have been so greatly extended. Our history will be brought ...
— Great Astronomers • R. S. Ball
... high even as a natural philosopher or physicist in his own age: he seems to have refused credence to the discoveries of Copernicus and Galileo, which had stirred the scientific world into great activity before his day; and his investigations in botany and vegetable physiology are crude and ...
— English Literature, Considered as an Interpreter of English History - Designed as a Manual of Instruction • Henry Coppee
... the faces of the ushers and of the pupils—one named Angelmare, from Versailles, who used to cut off trousers-straps from old boots, M. Mirbal and his red whiskers, the two professors of linear drawing and large drawing, who were always wrangling, and the Pole, the fellow-countryman of Copernicus, with his planetary system on pasteboard, an itinerant astronomer whose lecture had been paid for by a dinner in the refectory, then a terrible debauch while they were out on a walking excursion, the first pipes they had smoked, the distribution of prizes, and the delightful sensation ...
— Sentimental Education, Volume II - The History of a Young Man • Gustave Flaubert
... believe every degree of absurdity. For the first time since Antiquity, man walks free of all political and intellectual trammels, erect, conscious of his own thoughts, master of his own actions; ready to seek for truth across the ocean like Columbus, or across the heavens like Copernicus; to seek it in criticism and analysis like Machiavelli or Guicciardini, boldly to reproduce it in its highest, widest sense like Michael Angelo ...
— Euphorion - Being Studies of the Antique and the Mediaeval in the - Renaissance - Vol. I • Vernon Lee
... likewise an eminent astronomer. He believed that the earth was the center of the universe and that the sun, planets, and fixed stars all revolved around it. This Ptolemaic system was not overthrown until the grand discovery of Copernicus in the sixteenth century of ...
— EARLY EUROPEAN HISTORY • HUTTON WEBSTER
... exercised great influence on later philosophy, from Telesius and Nicolas, complaining the while that the priestly garb of the latter sometimes hindered the free movement of his thought. Beside these thinkers he has a high regard for Pythagoras, Plato, Lucretius, Raymundus Lullus, and Copernicus (died 1543).[1] He forms the transition link between Nicolas of Cusa and Leibnitz, as also the link between Cardanus and Spinoza. To Spinoza Bruno offered the naturalistic conception of God (God is the "first cause" immanent in the universe, to which self-manifestation or self-revelation ...
— History Of Modern Philosophy - From Nicolas of Cusa to the Present Time • Richard Falckenberg
... to one of the supreme spectacles of the moon, the immense ring or crater mountain Copernicus. This is generally regarded as the grandest object that the telescope reveals on the earth's satellite. It is about fifty-six miles across, and its interior falls to a depth of 8,000 feet below the Mare ...
— Pleasures of the telescope • Garrett Serviss
... Baalbec, or to carve, move, and set up the great statue of Rameses. Within a generation, Euclid of Alexandria was teaching geometry in Dartmouth College, and Heraclides and Aristarchus anticipated Copernicus by sixteen centuries. No man has surpassed the sculptures of Rhodes, or the paintings of the sixteenth century. The cathedral of Cologne is the offspring of forgotten brains. Such men as Anselm were educated on the Trivium and Quadrivium. Five hundred ...
— The History of Dartmouth College • Baxter Perry Smith
... complement of the octave, is the diapason of man. These are of course very highly imaginative speculations. It is interesting to remember, however, that the system of astronomy first taught by Pythagoras was afterwards developed into the solar system by Copernicus, and is now received as the Copernican system. But, turning from grave to gay, we find that five wits have been described, viz., common sense, imagination, fantasy, estimation, and memory. Of these, common sense passes judgment on all things; imagination brings the mind to realise ...
— The Art of Living in Australia • Philip E. Muskett (?-1909)
... studies, which he does in his great work, "Principia." Well does Emerson say that this work, purporting to explain the birth of worlds, places the man side by side with Aristotle, Leonardo, Bacon, Selden, Copernicus and Humboldt. ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great Philosophers, Volume 8 • Elbert Hubbard
... in the government, a great expansion was going on in their inner life. Caxton had set up his printing press, and the "art preservative of all arts," was bringing streams of new knowledge into thousands of homes. Copernicus had discovered a new Heaven, and Columbus a new Earth. The sun no longer circled around the Earth, nor was the Earth a flat plain. There was a revival of classic learning at Oxford, and Erasmus, the great preacher, ...
— The Evolution of an Empire • Mary Parmele
... he was forty-five he had discovered more stars than Copernicus. They were not all first-magnitude twinklers. Some of them even glowed so feebly that you could see their light only when he stood behind them, the steady radiance of his genius shining through. But taken as a whole they made a brilliant ...
— Half Portions • Edna Ferber
... and shades must merge away suavely into one another and prepare for one another. So a biologist like De Vries represents positivism, or the breaking of Continuity, by trying to conceive of evolution by mutation—against the dogma of indistinguishable gradations by "minute variations." A Copernicus conceives of helio-centricity. Continuity is against him. He is not permitted to break abruptly with the past. He is permitted to publish his work, but only as ...
— The Book of the Damned • Charles Fort
... impressed my imagination with anything but discomfort and terror. The Ptolemaic scheme was better suited to human needs. Our religious sense demands not only order but significance; a world not merely great, but relevant to our destinies. Copernicus, it is true, gave us liberty and space; but he bereft us of security and intimacy. And I thought of the great vision of Dante, so terrible and yet so beautiful, so human through and through,—that vision which, if it contracts space, expands the fate of man, and relates ...
— Appearances - Being Notes of Travel • Goldsworthy Lowes Dickinson
... was nothing. Copernicus and Kepler lay in full sunlight. The heights of the lunar mountains, the depths of the barren, empty seas were etched black and white, clear and clean. Grim, forbidding desolation, this unchanging Moon. In romance, moonlight may shimmer and sparkle to light ...
— Brigands of the Moon • Ray Cummings
... rock and stream, and the abodes of men, disappear; but the curtain is drawn up which concealed the heavenly hosts. There they shine and there they move, as they moved and shone to the eyes of Newton and Galileo, of Kepler and Copernicus, of Ptolemy and Hipparchus; yea, as they moved and shone when the morning stars sang together, and all the sons of God shouted for joy. All has changed on earth; but the glorious heavens remain unchanged. The plough has passed over ...
— Choice Specimens of American Literature, And Literary Reader - Being Selections from the Chief American Writers • Benj. N. Martin
... Greece or Italy, whither it was brought by Pythagoras after he had studied under the Indian Gymnosophists. And most certainly this great philosopher—who revealed to the world the heliocentric system before Copernicus and Galileo—knew better than anyone else how dependent are the least sounds in nature on Akasha and its interrelations. One of the four Vedas, namely, the Sama-Veda, entirely consists of hymns. This is a collection ...
— From the Caves and Jungles of Hindostan • Helena Pretrovna Blavatsky
... next reviewed the battle between science and theology on the subjects of the "earth's shape, surface, and relations," "the position of the earth among the heavenly bodies," in which Copernicus and Galileo struggled so bravely and ...
— Scientific American, Vol.22, No. 1, January 1, 1870 • Various
... days of Pythagoras, as may be seen by the hypothesis of Domenico Maria, about the variability of the axis of the globe, and by the labours of Mueller, better known by the Latin name derived from his native town of Koenigsberg, Regiomontanus, who almost anticipated Copernicus in discovering the true system of the universe. Few before or since have so excelled in mathematics and mechanics as Peurbach. Divinity had a profound and subtle exponent in the mild and gentle Thomas a Kempis. ...
— Tacitus and Bracciolini - The Annals Forged in the XVth Century • John Wilson Ross
... view of the universe; natural science among the Phenicians, the Greeks, at the time of the Ptolemies, at the time of the Roman Empire, and in the middle ages; natural history of modern times, Bacon, Copernicus, Kepler, Galileo, Newton; the mechanical doctrine of modern physics; the dynamic view of nature; Fichte's doctrine, and the natural philosophy of Schelling and Hegel. This volume, as will be easily ...
— The International Monthly, Volume 2, No. 4, March, 1851 • Various
... led to the hypothesis of epicycles and eccentrics. Only by the aid of this hypothesis, equally untrue, but capable of accounting more nearly for the appearances, and so of inducing more accurate observations—only thus did it become possible for Copernicus to show that the heliocentric theory is more feasible than the geocentric theory; or for Kepler to show that the planets move round the sun in ellipses. Yet again, without the aid of Kepler's more advanced theory of the Solar system, Newton ...
— Essays: Scientific, Political, & Speculative, Vol. I • Herbert Spencer
... the sun and the moon, by the planets and the comets, upon the tablets of the sky? Yet, without the ellipse, without the conic sections of Plato and Apollonius, astronomy would have been to this day a sealed science, and the labors of Hipparchus, Ptolemy, Tycho, and Copernicus would have waited in vain for the genius of Kepler and of Newton to educe divine order from the seeming ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 5, No. 30, April, 1860 • Various
... I should be made, particularly by my medical brethren, the subject of ridicule." Luckily he was quite prepared for both ridicule and opposition; for has not everything new been ridiculed and opposed? Galileo was opposed, Bruno was opposed, Copernicus was opposed, Harvey was opposed, George Stevenson was opposed, Pasteur was ridiculed and opposed, and so were Darwin, Simpson and even Lister. The physiological inertia even of the educated has too often blocked the ...
— Popular Science Monthly Volume 86
... and the Portuguese navigators were bringing hitherto unknown regions of the earth to the knowledge of Europe, a Polish astronomer, Kopernik (commonly known by his Latinized name, Copernicus), was reaching the conclusion that the ancient writers had been misled in supposing that the earth was the center of the universe. He discovered that, with the other planets, the earth revolved about the sun. This opened the way to an entirely new conception ...
— An Introduction to the History of Western Europe • James Harvey Robinson
... well as in theology. He subdued astronomy, physiology, and geography to the needs of poetry. Nine Muses were not enough for him, even though they included Urania. He called in to their aid Galen and Copernicus. He did not go to the hills and the springs for his images, but to the laboratory and the library, and in the library the books that he consulted to the greatest effect were the works of men of science and learning, not of the great poets with whom London may almost be said to have ...
— The Art of Letters • Robert Lynd
... determines the evidence in both cases to be unreal. To material sense it is plain also that the error of the revolution of the sun around the earth is more apparent than the adverse but true Science of the stellar universe. Copernicus has shown that what appears real, to material sense and feeling, is absolutely unreal. Astronomy, optics, acoustics, and hydraulics are all at war with the testimony of the physical senses. This fact intimates ...
— No and Yes • Mary Baker Eddy
... Moors were banished, the Jews were banished; and it had been the industry of these two races which had largely supported the pride and laziness of the hidalgos. In Italy, too, the Inquisition held sway. Galileo with his telescope revealed facts which proved the theories of Copernicus, and made impossible the ancient idea that our earth was the centre of the universe.[1] All Europe rang with his discoveries; but the Church refused to understand, forbade him to teach doctrines which it declared heretical. For a time the astronomer's mouth was closed, ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Volume 11 • Various
... is curious, and also touching, to notice how often the errors of man are thus the shadows of truth. Were it not for the preceding shadows, indeed, the substance would never arrive; and therefore the Ptolemaics of the world are second, in value and in merit, only to epochal discoverers like Copernicus. ...
— Harper's New Monthly Magazine, Vol. 3, July, 1851 • Various
... immediately underneath them, spread out the great land areas of the equatorial region. The four continents of Halle, Galileo, and Tycholand; then Huygens—which is to Mars what Europe, Asia, and Africa are to the Earth, then Herschell and Copernicus. Nearly all of these land masses were split up into semi-regular divisions by the famous canals which have ...
— A Honeymoon in Space • George Griffith
... the Turks (1453), hundreds of Greek scholars, with their old literature, sought refuge in Europe, and the vigorous brain of the young nations brooded over the ancient speculations, just as the vigorous young brain of Greece had done two thousand years before. Copernicus (1473-1543) acknowledges that he found the secret of the movements of the heavenly bodies in the speculations of the old Greek thinkers. Galilei (1564-1642) enlarged the Copernican system with the aid of the telescope; and the telescope was an outcome of the new study of optics ...
— The Story of Evolution • Joseph McCabe
... had to resign, and Araktcheyev, a reactionary of extreme type, was put in his place. Some idea of the dark days that followed may be gathered from Araktcheyev's first measures. The teaching of the geological theories of Buffon and of the systems of Copernicus and Newton were forbidden as contrary to Holy Writ. Medical dissection was prohibited, and the practice of medicine was reduced to that of faith cure. All professors who had studied at seats of learning abroad were dismissed. Then it was that the secret societies sprang up in Poland and in the north ...
— A History of the Nineteenth Century, Year by Year - Volume Two (of Three) • Edwin Emerson
... character were yet unformulated. The diurnal motion of the earth was hardly suspected until a hundred years later. But the facts on which these two fundamental truths are based were being gathered for Newton and Copernicus. When he died, those whom he had inspired and instructed continued the work to which he had devoted himself, under the patronage of his brother Alfonso and his nephew Joao II.; until, in 1486, Bartholomeo Diaz had sailed two hundred ...
— Great Men and Famous Women. Vol. 5 of 8 • Various
... means embodied the latest discoveries. In fact, it narrowly escaped being eighteenth-century science, for it was dated very early in the eighteen hundreds. But an astronomy was an astronomy to Mr. Tipping; and had Copernicus been born late enough, he would most certainly have imbibed Ptolemaic doctrines with grateful unsuspicion. Indeed, had it been put to him: "This astronomy after Copernicus at half-a-crown, and this after Ptolemy for sixpence," his means alone would have left ...
— Young Lives • Richard Le Gallienne
... Cusanus, however, was very much interested in mathematics and in the natural sciences, and we have many wonderful suggestions from his pen. He was the first, for instance, to suggest, more than a century before Copernicus, that the earth was not the centre of the universe, and that it would not be absolutely at rest or, as he said, devoid of all motion. His words are: "Terra igitur, quae centrum esse nequit, motu omni carere non potest." He described very clearly how the earth moved round its own axis, and then ...
— Old-Time Makers of Medicine • James J. Walsh
... labours, but in 1632 he published his immortal work Dialogo sopra i due Massimi Sistemi del monda, Tolemaico et Copernicano (Florence), which was the cause of his undoing. In this book he defended the opinion of Copernicus concerning the motion of the earth round the sun, which was supposed by the theologians of the day to be an opinion opposed to the teaching of Holy Scripture and subversive of all truth. The work was brought before the Inquisition ...
— Books Fatal to Their Authors • P. H. Ditchfield
... being 3.1416 nearly. He also wrote on Conoids and Spheroids, and upon that spiral still passing under his name, the genesis of which had been suggested to him by Conon. In his work entitled "Psammites" he alludes to the astronomical system subsequently established by Copernicus, whose name has been given to it. He also mentions the attempts which had been made to measure the size of the earth; the chief object of the work being, however, to prove not only that the sands upon the sea-shore can be numbered, ...
— History of the Intellectual Development of Europe, Volume I (of 2) - Revised Edition • John William Draper
... Great always rose before daylight. "I am," said he, "for making my life as long as possible, and therefore sleep as little as possible." Alfred the Great rose before daylight. In the hours of early morning Columbus planned his voyage to America, and Napoleon his greatest campaigns. Copernicus was an early riser, as were most of the famous astronomers of ancient and modern times. Bryant rose at five, Bancroft at dawn, and nearly all our leading authors in the early morning. Washington, Jefferson, Webster, Clay, and Calhoun ...
— Pushing to the Front • Orison Swett Marden
... each one of us with the world and with our fellow beings. And the influence of science may be seen in the elimination of great illusions which in former centuries swayed this or that part of civilized humanity. The scientific thought of Copernicus and Galilei did away with the illusions which led people to believe that the earth was the center of the ...
— The Positive School of Criminology - Three Lectures Given at the University of Naples, Italy on April 22, 23 and 24, 1901 • Enrico Ferri
... and his Purpose. Should any one of the readers of this Cycle doubt the enduring greatness of the lines, let him consider that I, Wolfgang Copernicus Addleburger, have seen fit to ...
— The Love Sonnets of a Car Conductor • Wallace Irwin
... may not seize even the wisest, most experienced, most practical, and reasonable of men; and I would sooner undertake to conjecture how high the thermometer stands at this instant on the crest of Mount Copernicus up yonder in the moon, than attempt to guess what freak will decide a man's choice ...
— St. Elmo • Augusta J. Evans
... in those days Machiavelli released government from the restraint of law; Erasmus diverted the current of ancient learning from profane into Christian channels; Luther broke the chain of authority and tradition at the strongest link; and Copernicus erected an invincible power that set for ever the mark of progress upon the time that was to come. There is the same unbound originality and disregard for inherited sanctions in the rare philosophers as in the discovery of Divine ...
— Lectures on Modern history • Baron John Emerich Edward Dalberg Acton
... thing is that these millions, this vast plant, these thousands of positions demanding trained men, have brought to life upon this ground the guild of scholars. We do not need any more to exhort men to become scholars. The spirit which was in Thales and Copernicus, in Agassiz and Kirkwood, calls to the Hoosier farmboy in its own voice, and shows him a clear path by which, if he is fit, he may join their ...
— Modern American Prose Selections • Various
... its wise minority? Why does it cry and resist before it is hurt? Why does it not encourage its citizens to put out its faults, and do better than it would have them? Why does it always crucify Christ and excommunicate Copernicus and Luther, and pronounce ...
— On the Duty of Civil Disobedience • Henry David Thoreau
... considered as a final scientific interpretation of the last fifteen centuries, its shortcomings are simply immeasurable. The history of Europe, from the fusion of the Christian Impulse with Roman imperialism to the time of Columbus, Copernicus, and Luther, is the history of a grand religious idealism established over men's heads in the form of an institution, because too great to be held in solution by their thoughts. Of such a matter the writer in question could ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 13, No. 79, May, 1864 • Various
... opposite result of that which you wish to infer; I mean, that we are older and have lived longer than our predecessors.' He then proceeds to apply this, by tracing the course of astronomy through the earlier astronomers up to Copernicus."—Philosophy of the Inductive Sciences, vol. ...
— Notes and Queries, Number 58, December 7, 1850 • Various
... which had elapsed since 1485, Copernicus's discovery that the sun and not the earth was the center of our universe, had revolutionized the map of the heavens, as Columbus's discovery of America had revolutionized the map of the world. Thus stimulated, scientific investigation started afresh, working in accordance with ...
— An Introduction to Shakespeare • H. N. MacCracken
... priest, and sent to minister to an obscure and stricken church in the south of France. The country was battle-scarred, and poverty, ignorance and want stalked through the streets of the little village. Here Fenelon lived, as did the exiled Copernicus, forbidden to travel more than six miles from his church, or to speak to any but his own flock. Here he gave his life as a teacher of children, a nurse, a doctor and a spiritual guide to a people almost ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great, Vol. 13 - Little Journeys to the Homes of Great Lovers • Elbert Hubbard
... This appears, at all events, to accord better with the possibility of our gaining the end we have in view, that is to say, of arriving at the cognition of objects a priori, of determining something with respect to these objects, before they are given to us. We here propose to do just what Copernicus did in attempting to explain the celestial movements. When he found that he could make no progress by assuming that all the heavenly bodies revolved round the spectator, he reversed the process, and tried the experiment of assuming that the ...
— The Critique of Pure Reason • Immanuel Kant
... hold that the sun approaches nearer and nearer, and therefore by ever-lessening circles reaches the tropics and the equator every year a little sooner. They measure months by the course of the moon, years by that of the sun. They praise Ptolemy, admire Copernicus, but place Aristarchus and Philolaus before him. They take great pains in endeavouring to understand the construction of the world, and whether or not it will perish, and at what time. They believe that the true oracle of Jesus Christ is by the signs in the sun, ...
— Ideal Commonwealths • Various
... before Copernicus, the conception of the "universe" was defensible on scientific grounds: the diurnal revolution of the heavenly bodies bound them together as all parts of one system, of which the earth was the centre. ...
— Mysticism and Logic and Other Essays • Bertrand Russell
... subject, material, intellectual, or social, undergo a thorough change in consequence of new observations, I call that movement of the mind REVOLUTION. If the ideas are simply extended or modified, there is only PROGRESS. Thus the system of Ptolemy was a step in astronomical progress, that of Copernicus was a revolution. So, in 1789, there was struggle and progress; revolution there was none. An examination of the reforms which were ...
— What is Property? - An Inquiry into the Principle of Right and of Government • P. J. Proudhon
... Newton have asserted that his was the most gigantic intellect ever bestowed on man. He discovered the law of gravitation, and by it explained all the broader phenomena of nature, such as the movements of the planets, the shape and revolution of the earth, the succession of the tides. Copernicus had asserted that the planets moved, ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Volume 12 • Editor-In-Chief Rossiter Johnson
... she may keep them hidden. AEons and aeons we progressed And did not let that break our rest; Little we cared if Mars o'erhead Were or were not inhabited; Without the aid of Saturn's rings Fair girls were wived in those far springs; Warm lips met ours and conquered us Or ere thou wert, Copernicus! ...
— The Sisters' Tragedy • Thomas Bailey Aldrich
... true courses, are indispensable to transcendent excellence; and Shakspeare's plays were as much the offspring of the long generations who had pioneered his road for him, as the discoveries of Newton were the offspring of those of Copernicus. ...
— The Reign of Henry the Eighth, Volume 1 (of 3) • James Anthony Froude
... manhood's view of God creating and sustaining all things from within," is indeed as this working geologist so well says, "the essential change which modern science has wrought in the habit of religious thought. From Copernicus to Darwin, every important step in the development of science has cost the giving up of some idea of a God creating things as man shapes them from without, and has illustrated the higher idea of God reaching His works from within. Every step has led toward the ...
— The Arena - Volume 4, No. 19, June, 1891 • Various
... the highly illustrious mathematician and astronomer Ptolemy, whose system obtained respect and belief until the advent of Copernicus; the physician Galen; the philosopher-physician Sextus Empiricus, who was a good historian, highly sceptical, but well informed and ...
— Initiation into Literature • Emile Faguet
... Copernicus had the same idea, of course, when he fared forth into space, and discovered the centre of all power to be in the sun. It grieved people a good deal to find how much more important the sky was than they were, and their whole little planet with all of them on it. The idea that that big blue field ...
— Crowds - A Moving-Picture of Democracy • Gerald Stanley Lee
... same kind is so very remarkable that I cannot forbear mentioning it. It was objected to the system of Copernicus when first brought forward, that if the earth turned on its axis, as he represented, a stone dropped from the summit of a tower would not fall at the foot of it, but at a great distance to the west; in ...
— Historic Doubts Relative To Napoleon Buonaparte • Richard Whately
... explore the immense Crater of Copernicus, which, yawning fifty miles across, presents a wonderful appearance even from the distance of the earth. The ship in which I, myself, had the good fortune to embark, was bound for the mysterious ...
— Edison's Conquest of Mars • Garrett Putnam Serviss
... "He that would appear wise will not be satisfied with anything that others do; he must do something for himself, and that must be better than anything. This fool (Copernicus) wants to overturn the whole science of astronomy. But, as the holy Scriptures tell us, Joshua told the sun to stand still, and not the ...
— The History of Freedom • John Emerich Edward Dalberg-Acton
... particular attention to S. Thomas and to Raymond Lully. Plato, as expounded by Plotinus, had taken firm hold on his imagination. He was versed in the dialectics of the previous age, had mastered mediaeval cosmography and mathematics, and was probably already acquainted with Copernicus. The fragments of the Greek philosophers, especially of Pythagoras and Parmenides, whose metaphysics powerfully influenced his mind, had been assimilated. Perhaps the writings of Cardinal Cusa, the theologian who applied mathematics to philosophy, were also in his hands at ...
— Renaissance in Italy, Volumes 1 and 2 - The Catholic Reaction • John Addington Symonds
... of all fear of mistakes and their consequences, and so enabled him to pursue his jehad with all the advantages in his favour. He was, in brief, more than the greatest Puritan gladiator of his time; he was the Copernicus of a quite new art and science, and he devised a technique and handed down a professional ethic that no rival has been able ...
— A Book of Prefaces • H. L. Mencken
... the study of Mars, the wildest wanderer of all, that we owe the removal of all these perplexities. The idea had occurred to the great astronomer, Copernicus, that the complexities of the planets' paths are not real, but are caused by the constant moving about of the place from whence we watch the planets. If a fly at rest at the middle of a clock face watched the ends of the two hands, they would seem to ...
— St. Nicholas Magazine for Boys and Girls, Vol. 5, Nov 1877-Nov 1878 - No 1, Nov 1877 • Various
... here received its most solid improvements: the efforts of imagination and sentiment were most frequent and most successful in the south. While the shores of the Baltic became famed for the studies of Copernicus, Tycho Brahe, and Kepler, those of the Mediterranean were celebrated for giving birth to men of genius in all its variety, and for having abounded with poets and historians, as well as ...
— An Essay on the History of Civil Society, Eighth Edition • Adam Ferguson, L.L.D.
... relatively to the end which he has in view, there is a moment when each manufacturer represents in his own person society itself, sees better and farther than all other men combined, and frequently without being able to explain himself or make himself understood. When Copernicus, Kepler, and Galileo, Newton's predecessors, came to the point of saying to Christian society, then represented by the Church: "The Bible is mistaken; the earth revolves, and the sun is stationary," they were right against society, which, on the strength of its senses ...
— The Philosophy of Misery • Joseph-Pierre Proudhon
... governed with so much wisdom and so much justice; and the power back of our progress is intellectual, moral, and religious. Science is not material. It is the product of intellect and will; and the great founders of modern science, Copernicus, Kepler, Bacon, Descartes, Galileo, Newton, Leibnitz, Ampere, Liebig, Fresnel, Faraday, and Mayer, were Christians. "However paradoxical it may sound," says DuBois-Reymond, "modern science owes ...
— Education and the Higher Life • J. L. Spalding
... is for their fame, for art lasts longer than thought. The fashion of a man's thought may pass away; his knowledge and his ideas may lose their stamp, either because they prove to be false or because they become universally current. Everybody believes Copernicus, but nobody reads him. Yet when a book, no matter how obsolete in thought, is marked by great beauty of style, it lives forever. Consider the case of Sir Thomas Browne. Art is ...
— The Advance of English Poetry in the Twentieth Century • William Lyon Phelps
... most of the men by whom they were collected have passed away. Next to these come the men who have been engaged in the arrangement of facts and in their comparison, with a view to deduce therefrom the laws by which the world is governed, and which constitute science. Copernicus devoted his life to the study of numerous facts, by aid of which he was at length enabled to give to the world a knowledge of the great fact that the earth revolved around the sun; but he had therein, from the ...
— Letters on International Copyright; Second Edition • Henry C. Carey
... to the three greatest events in science: the discovery of the Copernican system, the three laws of Kepler, and Newton's law of gravitation, none of which is due to direct and special experimentation. Copernicus was an astronomer, but the discovery of his system is due chiefly to his study of the complications of the Ptolemaic system. Kepler is a memorable witness of what can be accomplished by skillful and persistent mental labor. "His discoveries were secrets extorted from nature by ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 286 - June 25, 1881 • Various
... eye the moon's face appears variegated with dusky patches, while a few points of superior brilliance shine amid the brighter portions, especially in the southern and eastern quarters, where immense craters like Tycho and Copernicus are visible to a keen eye, gleaming like polished buttons. With a telescope, even of moderate power, the surface of the moon presents a scene of astonishing complexity, in which strangeness, beauty, and grandeur are all combined. The half of the moon ...
— Other Worlds - Their Nature, Possibilities and Habitability in the Light of the Latest Discoveries • Garrett P. Serviss
... towered toward heaven, the Sphynx gazed on with calm, earnest eyes, Memnon made music of welcome to the sun, and our token sealed the shrivelled silent lips of the Egyptian. The world emerged from its night. Dante and Aquinas, Copernicus and Galileo, Luther and Melanchthon, Gutenberg and Faust, Kant and Schlegel, Bacon, Leibnitz and Newton, Watt and Morse, tore away the seals before our token saw the light. It came forth into a new world by the hand of a missionary, preaching a religion founded three hundred years after ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol. 6, No. 6, December 1864 - Devoted To Literature And National Policy • Various
... obliquity of the ecliptic, the earth's spherical form, the reflected light of the moon, the earth's daily axial revolution, the presence of fixed stars in the Milky Way, the law of gravitation, and other scientific facts which did not dawn in the Western world until the time of Copernicus and Newton." ...
— Autobiography of a YOGI • Paramhansa Yogananda
... 'I quite understand that Plato or Aeschylus may have had fine ideas, but surely anything of value which they said must long before this have become common property. There is no need to go back to the Greeks for it. We do not go back and read Copernicus to learn that the earth goes round the sun.' What is the answer? It is that such a view ignores exactly this difference between the progressive and the eternal, between knowledge and imagination. If Harvey discovers that the blood is not stationary ...
— The Legacy of Greece • Various
... voice of one impatiently crying in the wilderness, 'Not unto Aristotle, not unto subtle hypothesis, not unto church, Bible, or blind tradition, must we turn for a knowledge of the universe, but to the direct investigation of nature by observation and experiment.' In 1543 the epoch-marking work of Copernicus on the paths of the heavenly bodies appeared. The total crash of Aristotle's closed universe, with the earth at its centre, followed as a consequence, and 'The earth moves!' became a kind of watchword among intellectual freemen. Copernicus was Canon of the church of Frauenburg ...
— Fragments of science, V. 1-2 • John Tyndall |
