The history of astronomy is a history of receding horizons.
Equipped with his five senses, man explores the universe around him and calls the adventure Science.
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.
All nature is a vast symbolism: Every material fact has sheathed within it a spiritual truth.
Equipped with our five senses – along with telescopes and microscopes and mass spectrometers and seismographs and magnetometers and particle accelerators and detectors sensitive to the entire electromagnetic spectrum – we explore the universe around us and call the adventure science.
Past time is finite, future time is infinite.
I knew that even if I were second or third rate, it was astronomy that mattered.
The universe is unfolding as it should.
Astronomy is something like the ministry. No one should go into it without a call. I got that unmistakable call, and I know that even if I were second-rate or third-rate, it was astronomy that mattered.
Wisdom cannot be directly transmitted, and does not readily accumulate through the ages.
Science is the one human activity that is totally progressive.
Not until the empirical resources are exhausted, need we pass on to the dreamy realms of speculation.
The great spirals, with their enormous radial velocities and insensible proper motions, apparently lie outside our Solar system.
Science is the one human activity that is truly progressive. The body of positive knowledge is transmitted from generation to generation.
The outstanding feature, however, is the possibility that the velocity-distance relation may represent the de Sitter effect, and hence that numerical data may be introduced into discussions of the general curvature of space.
At the last dim horizon, we search among ghostly errors of observations for landmarks that are scarcely more substantial. The search will continue. The urge is older than history. It is not satisfied and it will not be oppressed.
There we measure shadows, and we search among ghostly errors of measurement for landmarks that are scarcely more substantial.
Observation always involves theory.