Galileo played a major role in the scientific revolution during the Renaissance period. He was the first to discover the rings of Saturn. His work in physics helped Newton formulate the laws of motion. Here is a list of some of his finest sayings:
1. I do not feel obliged to believe that the same God who has endowed us with senses, reason, and intellect has intended us to forgo their use. (context: Galileo's trial by The Church)
2. The book of the universe is written in a mathematical language, without whose help it is impossible to comprehend a single word of it; without which one wanders in vain through a dark labyrinth.
3. 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.
4. My dear Kepler, what would you say of the learned here, who have steadfastly refused to cast a glance through the telescope? What shall we make of this? Shall we laugh, or shall we cry? (In a 1610 letter, Galileo's trial)
5. 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.
6. In the long run my observations have convinced me that most men, reasoning preposterously, first establish some conclusion in their minds which, either because of its being their own or because of their having received it from some person who has their entire confidence, impresses them so deeply that one finds it impossible ever to get it out of their heads.
7. In questions of science the authority of a thousand is not worth the humble reasoning of a single individual.
8. I have been in my bed for five weeks, oppressed with weakness and other infirmities from which my age, seventy four years, permits me not to hope release. Added to this, the sight of my right eye — that eye whose labors (dare I say it) have had such glorious results — is for ever lost. That of the left, which was and is imperfect, is rendered null by continual weeping. [context: His house arrest after the trial; Galileo became partially blind by looking at the Sun through his telescope]
9. Light held together by moisture. (his description of wine)
10. You cannot teach a man anything, you can only help him to find it within himself.
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