Johannes Kepler Quotes

“The soul of the newly born baby is marked for life by the pattern of the stars at the moment it comes into the world, unconsciously remembers it, and remains sensitive to the return of configurations of a similar kind.”

— Johannes Kepler

“After the birth of printing books became widespread. Hence everyone throughout Europe devoted himself to the study of literature ... Every year, especially since 1563, the number of writings published in every field is greater than all those produced in the past thousand years. The Paracelsians have created medicine anew and the Copernicans have created astronomy anew. I really believe that at last the world is alive, indeed seething, and that the stimuli of these remarkable conjunctions did not act in vain.”

— Johannes Kepler

“I have consummated the work to which I pledged myself, using all the abilities that You (God) gave me; I have shown the glory of Your works to men, but if I have pursued my own glory among men while engaged in a work intended for Your glory, be merciful, be compassionate, and forgive.”

— Johannes Kepler

“Planets move in ellipses with the Sun at one focus.”

— Johannes Kepler

“The radius vector describes equal areas in equal times.”

— Johannes Kepler

“The squares of the periodic times are to each other as the cubes of the mean distances.”

— Johannes Kepler

“Science is the process of thinking God's thoughts after Him.”

— Johannes Kepler

The heavenly bodies are nothing but a continuous song for several voices (perceived by the intellect, not by the ear); a music which ... sets landmarks in the immeasurable flow of time. It is therefore, no longer surprising that man, in imitation of his creator, has at last discovered the art of figured song, which was unknown to the ancients. Man wanted to reproduce the continuity of cosmic time ... to obtain a sample test of the delight of the Divine Creator in His works, and to partake of his joy by making music in the imitation of God.

— Johannes Kepler

I am stealing the golden vessels of the Egyptians to build a tabernacle to my God from them, far far away from the boundaries of Egypt. If you forgive me, I shall rejoice; if you are enraged with me, I shall bear it. See, I cast the die, and I write the book. Whether it is to be read by the people of the present or of the future makes no difference: let it await its reader for a hundred years, if God himself has stood ready for six thousand years for one to study him.

— Johannes Kepler

“We do not ask for what useful purpose the birds do sing, for song is their pleasure since they were created for singing. Similarly, we ought not to ask why the human mind troubles to fathom the secrets of the heavens ...”

— Johannes Kepler

“It is a right, yes a duty, to search in cautious manner for the numbers, sizes, and weights, the norms for everything [God] has created. For He himself has let man take part in the knowledge of these things ... For these secrets are not of the kind whose research should be forbidden; rather they are set before our eyes like a mirror so that by examining them we observe to some extent the goodness and wisdom of the Creator.”

— Johannes Kepler

“I had the intention of becoming a theologian ... but now I see how God is, by my endeavors, also glorified in astronomy, for 'the heavens declare the glory of God.'”

— Johannes Kepler

“Ships and sails proper for the heavenly air should be fashioned. Then there will also be people, who do not shrink from the dreary vastness of space.”

— Johannes Kepler

“My aim is to say that the machinery of the heavens is not like a divine animal but like a clock (and anyone who believes a clock has a soul gives the work the honour due to its maker) and that in it almost all the variety of motions is from one very simple magnetic force acting on bodies, as in the clock all motions are from a very simple weight.”

— Johannes Kepler

“Wherever there are qualities there are likewise quantities, but not always vice versa.”

— Johannes Kepler

“I believe only and alone in the service of Jesus Christ. In him is all refuge and solace.”

— Johannes Kepler

“Great is God our Lord, great is His power and there is no end to His wisdom. Praise Him you heavens, glorify Him, sun and moon and you planets. For out of Him and through Him, and in Him are all things ... We know, oh, so little. To Him be the praise, the honor and the glory from eternity to eternity.”

— Johannes Kepler

“My greatest desire is that I may perceive the God whom I find everywhere in the external world, in like manner also within and inside myself.”

— Johannes Kepler

“When things are in order, if the cause of the orderliness cannot be deduced from the motion of the elements or from the composition of matter, it is quite possibly a cause possessing a mind.”

— Johannes Kepler

“If my false figures came near to the facts, this happened merely by chance ... These comments are not worth printing. Yet it gives me pleasure to remember how many detours I had to make, along how many walls I had to grope in the darkness of my ignorance until I found the door which lets in the light of the truth ... In such manner did I dream of the truth.”

— Johannes Kepler

“Geometry is the archetype of the beauty of the world.”

— Johannes Kepler

“[Quantity is the fundamental feature of things,] the 'primarium accidens substantiae,' ... prior to the other categories.”

— Johannes Kepler

“O telescope, instrument of knowledge, more precious than any sceptre.”

— Johannes Kepler

“The cause of the six-sided shape of a snowflake is none other than that of the ordered shapes of plants and of numerical constants; and since in them nothing occurs without supreme reason-not, to be sure, such as discursive reasoning discovers, but such as existed from the first in the Creators's design and is preserved from that origin to this day in the wonderful nature of animal faculties, I do not believe that even in a snowflake this ordered pattern exists at random.”

— Johannes Kepler

“I am a Lutheran astrologer, I throw away the nonsense and keep the hard kernel.”

— Johannes Kepler

[God] is the kind Creator who brought forth nature out of nothing.

— Johannes Kepler

I also ask you my friends not to condemn me entirely to the mill of mathematical calculations, and allow me time for philosophical speculations, my only pleasures.

— Johannes Kepler

“If this [the Mysterium cosmographicum] is published, others will perhaps make discoveries I might have reserved for myself. But we are all ephemeral creatures (and none more so than I). I have, therefore, for the Glory of God, who wants to be recognized from the book of Nature, that these things may be published as quickly as possible. The more others build on my work the happier I shall be.”

— Johannes Kepler

“If the moon and earth were not retained in their orbits by their animal force or some other equivalent, the earth would mount to the moon by a fifty-fourth part of their distance, and the moon fall towards the earth through the other fifty-three parts, and they would there meet, assuming, however, that the substance of both is of the same density.”

— Johannes Kepler

“I myself, a professional mathematician, on re-reading my own work find it strains my mental powers to recall to mind from the figures the meanings of the demonstrations, meanings which I myself originally put into the figures and the text from my mind. But when I attempt to remedy the obscurity of the material by putting in extra words, I see myself falling into the opposite fault of becoming chatty in something mathematical.”

— Johannes Kepler

“Geometry existed before the creation. It is co-eternal with the mind of God ... Geometry provided God with a model for the Creation ...”

— Johannes Kepler

“Those laws are within the grasp of the human mind. God wanted us to recognize them by creating us after his own image so that we could share in his own thoughts ... and if piety allow us to say so, our understanding is in this respect of the same kind as the divine, at least as far as we are able to grasp something of it in our mortal life.”

— Johannes Kepler

The heavenly motions ... are nothing but a continuous song for several voices, perceived not by the ear but by the intellect, a figured music which sets landmarks in the immeasurable flow of time.

— Johannes Kepler

“Why waste words? Geometry existed before the Creation, is co-eternal with the mind of God, is God himself (what exists in God that is not God himself?): geometry provided God with a model for the Creation and was implanted into man, together with God's own likeness - and not merely conveyed to his mind through the eyes.”

— Johannes Kepler

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

— Johannes Kepler

“If the earth were not round, heavy bodies would not tend from every side in a straight line towards the center of the earth, but to different points from different sides.”

— Johannes Kepler

“Since geometry is co-eternal with the divine mind before the birth of things, God himself served as his own model in creating the world (for what is there in God which is not God?), and he with his own image reached down to humanity.”

— Johannes Kepler

“Without proper experiments I conclude nothing.”

— Johannes Kepler

“For a long time I wanted to become a theologian ... now, however, behold how through my efforts God is being debated in astronomy.”

— Johannes Kepler

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

— Johannes Kepler

In theology we must consider the predominance of authority; in philosophy the predominance of reason.

— Johannes Kepler

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

— Johannes Kepler

“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.”

— Johannes Kepler

“The sphere of the attractive virtue which is in the moon extends as far as the earth, and entices up the waters; but as the moon flies rapidly across the zenith, and the waters cannot follow so quickly, a flow of the ocean is occasioned in the torrid zone towards the westward.”

— Johannes Kepler

We find, therefore, under this orderly arrangement, a wonderful symmetry in the universe, and a definite relation of harmony in the motion and magnitude of the orbs, of a kind that is not possible to obtain in any other way.

— Johannes Kepler

Repudiating the sensible world, which he neither sees himself nor believes from those who have, the Peripatetic joins combat by childish quibbling in a world on paper, and denies the Sun shines because he himself is blind.

— Johannes Kepler

“A mind is accustomed to mathematical deduction, when confronted with the faulty foundations of astrology, resists a long, long time, like an obstinate mule, until compelled by beating and curses to put its foot into that dirty puddle.”

— Johannes Kepler

“A most unfailing experience ... of the excitement of sublunary (that is, human) natures by the conjunctions and aspects of the planets has instructed and compelled my unwilling belief.”

— Johannes Kepler

“Geometry, which before the origin of things was coeternal with the divine mind and is God himself (for what could there be in God which would not be God himself?), supplied God with patterns for the creation of the world, and passed over to Man along with the image of God; and was not in fact taken in through the eyes.”

— Johannes Kepler

“Either ... the moving intelligences of the planets are weakest in those that are farthest from the sun, or ... there is one moving intelligence in the sun, the common center, forcing them all round, but those most violently which are nearest, and that it languishes in some sort and grows weaker at the most distant, because of the remoteness and the attenuation of the virtue.”

— Johannes Kepler