Nature . . . is inexorable and immutable; she never transgresses the laws imposed upon her, nor cares a whit whether her abstruse reasons and methods of operations are understandable to men.

They who depend upon manifest observations will philosophize better than those who persist in opinions repugnant to the senses.

The Milky Way is nothing else but a mass of innumerable stars planted together in clusters.

But of all other stupendous inventions, what sublimity of mind must have been his who conceived how to communicate his most secret thoughts to any other person, though very far distant either in time or place? And with no greater difficulty than the various arrangement of two dozen little signs upon paper? Let this be the seal of all the admirable inventions of man.

Long experience has taught me this about the status of mankind with regard to matters requiring thought: the less people know and understand about them, the more positively they attempt to argue concerning them, while on the other hand to know and understand a multitude of things renders men cautious in passing judgment upon anything new.

Nonetheless, it moves.

The prohibition of science would be contrary to the Bible, which in hundreds of places teaches us how the greatness and the glory of God shine forth marvelously in all His works, and is to be read above all in the open book of the heavens.