1. “Observations always involve theory.”
2. “The history of astronomy is a history of receding horizons.”
3. “The universe is unfolding as it should be.”
4. “I chucked the law for astronomy, and I knew that even if I were second-rate or third-rate, it was astronomy that mattered”
5. “Past time is finite, future time is infinite.”
6. “Eventually we reach the utmost limits of our telescopes. There we measure shadows and we search among ghostly errors of measurement for landmarks that are scarcely more substantial.”
7. “All nature is a vast symbolism: Every material fact has sheathed within it a spiritual truth.”
8. “Wisdom cannot be directly transmitted, and does not readily accumulate through ages.”
9. “Science is the one human activity that is truly progressive. The body of positive knowledge is transmitted from generation to generation.”
10. “Equipped with his five senses, man explores the universe around him and calls the adventure Science”
11. “We do not know why we are born into the world, but we can try to find out what sort of a world it is – at least in its physical aspects.”
12. “The whole thing is so much bigger than I am, and I can’t understand it, so I just trust myself to it; and forget about it.”
13. “The great spirals… apparently lie outside our stellar system.”
14. “Not until the empirical resources are exhausted, need we pass on to the dreamy realms of speculation.”
15. “We find them smaller and fainter, in constantly increasing numbers and we know that we are reaching into space, farther, until, with the faintest nebulae that can be detected with the greatest telescopes, we arrive at the frontier of the known universe.”
