Herschel Quotes

1. "Hot tears rolled from Herschel's eyes and he wiped them away, afraid that they would drip through the boards and onto his father's unfeeling tormentors."
Author: Bodie Thoene

2. "What caused me to undertake the catalog was the nebula I discovered above the southern horn of Taurus on September 12, 1758, while observing the comet of that year. ... This nebula had such a resemblance to a comet in its form and brightness that I endeavored to find others, so that astronomers would not confuse these same nebulae with comets just beginning to shine. I observed further with suitable refractors for the discovery of comets, and this is the purpose I had in mind in compiling the catalog.After me, the celebrated Herschel published a catalog of 2000 which he has observed. This unveiling the sky, made with instruments of great aperture, does not help in the perusal of the sky for faint comets. Thus my object is different from his, and I need only nebulae visible in a telescope of two feet [focal length]."
Author: Charles Messier

3. "Is it not curious, that so vast a being as the whale should see the world through so small an eye, and hear the thunder through an ear which is smaller than a hare's? But if his eyes were broad as the lens of Herschel's great telescope; and his ears capacious as the porches of cathedrals; would that make him any longer of sight, or sharper of hearing? Not at all.-Why then do you try to 'enlarge' your mind? Subtilize it."
Author: Hermann Melville

4. "The Europeans are all deeply tainted with prejudices, both ecclesiastical and temporal, which they can never get rid of. They are all infected with episcopal and presbyterian creeds, and confessions of faith. They all believe that great Principle which has produced this boundless universe, Newton's universe and Herschell's universe, came down to this little ball, to be spit upon by Jews. And until this awful blasphemy is got rid of, there never will be any liberal science in the world.-Letter to Thomas Jefferson (22 January 1825)"
Author: John Adams

5. "As an astronomer in the true sense of the term, Sir John Herschel stood before all his contemporaries. Nay, he stood almost alone."
Author: John Herschel

6. "I saw Herschel and he saw me and we stood next to each other because that is what friends do in the presence of evil or love."
Author: Jonathan Safran Foer

7. "Herschel was a Jew.""And he was my best friend.""He was his best friend.""And I murdered him."
Author: Jonathan Safran Foer

8. "Herschel removed the speckled tent-roof from the world and exposed the immeasurable deeps of space, dim-flecked with fleets of colossal suns sailing their billion-leagued remoteness."
Author: Mark Twain

9. "Rick to Herschel: My wife is pregnant. That is either a gift here, or a death sentence out there."
Author: The Walking Dead

10. "It turns out to be the new Planet, which, a decade and a half later, will be known first as the Georgian, and then as Herschel, after its official Discoverer, and more lately as Uranus."
Author: Thomas Pynchon

11. "Coelorum perrupit claustra.He broke through the barriers of the skies.[Herschel's epitaph]"
Author: William Herschel

Herschel Quotes Pictures