Galileo Galilei

"Errors are not in the art but in the artificers."

"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."

"Art and science have not a combat but a connivance."

"Nothing is so eternal as change."

"The universe cannot be read until we have learned the language and become familiar with the characters in which it is written."

"You cannot discover oceans unless you have the courage to lose sight of the shore."

"The more you know about the ways of the world, the less you can hold onto illusions."

"Mathematics is the alphabet in which God wrote the universe."

"We are all cripples, but some are privileged cripples in the university."

"Authority cannot make what is false to be true."

"The great book of nature can be read only by those who know the language in which it is written."

"Imperfection and uncertainty in our everyday experience are the prime condition for all scientific inquiry."

"The difficulty lies not so much in developing new ideas as in escaping from old ones."

"Long experience has taught me this about the status of affairs in this world: that we are usually the biggest obstacles to ourselves."

"I wish, my dear Kepler, that we could laugh together at the remarkable stupidity of the multitude."

"It is the glory of God to conceal a thing, but the glory of kings to find it out."

"Nature's laws are written in the language of mathematics."

"You cannot learn to swim in the desert."

"The test of all knowledge is experiment. Experiment is the sole judge of scientific truth."

"Men were born to study philosophy and astronomy."

"The gates of truth are guarded by reason and empiricism."

"Common sense is not so common."

"I think that in the discussion of natural problems we ought to begin not with the Scriptures, but with experiments and demonstrations."

"Patience and perseverance have a magical effect on problems."

"To be afraid is to expect the worst that could possibly happen."

"Where the senses fail us, reason must step in."

"You cannot believe how hard I have worked on this telescope."

"The eternal silence of those infinite spaces frightens me not."

"In physics, you don't have to go around making trouble for yourself. Nature does it for you."

"The beauty of a living thing is not the atoms that go into it, but the way those atoms are put together."