Astronomy would not provide me with bread if men did not entertain hopes of reading the future in the heavens.

Do we ask what profit the little bird hopes for in singing?

I measured the skies, now the shadows I measure, Sky-bound was the mind, earth-bound the body rests. [Kepler's epitaph]

Thus God himself was too kind to remain idle and began to play the game of signatures signing his likeness unto the world: therefore I chance to think that all nature and the graceful sky are symbolized in the art of Geometria.

Geometry is one and eternal shining in the mind of God

Astronomy would not provide me with bread if men did not entertain hopes of reading the future in the heavens.

Yet in this my stars were not Mercury as morning star in the angle of the seventh house, in quartile with Mars, but they were Copernicus, they were Tycho Brahe, without whose books of observations everything which has now been brought by me into the brightest daylight would lie buried in darkness.