Telescope Inspiring Quotes

where the telescope ends the microscope begins, and who can say which has the wider vision?

Justice based purely on laws is about as accurate as a portrait created out of large low-resolution color pixels. If you stand back far enough it looks good. Come any closer and the glaring approximations overtake all semblance of the original. Justice should be viewable under the microscope, not from a telescope. And for that it needs to be based not on law but on truth.

Or to look at it from the other end of the telescope: Who in your life, do you remember most fondly, with the most feelings of warmth? Those who were kindest to you, I bet. It's a little facile, maybe, and certainly hard to implement, but I'd say, as a goal in life, you could do worse than: Try to be kinder.

Inside the mirrored elevator, Mulch used a telescopic pointer to push P for the penthouse. For the first few months he had jumped to reach the button, but that was undignified behavior for a millionaire. And besides, he was certain that Art could hear the thumping from the security desk.

Rather than feeling lost and unimportant and meaningless, set against galaxies which go beyond the reach of the furthest telescopes, I feel that my life has meaning. Perhaps I should feel insignificant, but instead I feel a soaring in my heart that the God who could create all this — and out of nothing — can still count the hairs of my head.

Shine your light so bright, and no one will need a telescope to see you.

If I was building any new kind of life to live, it really didn't seem that way. It's not as if I had turned in any old one to live it. If anything, I wanted to understand things and then be free of them. I needed to learn how to telescope things, ideas. Things were too big to see all at once, like all the books in the library -everything laying around on all the tables. You might be able to put it all into one paragraph or into one verse of a song if you could get it right.

She’s just jealous, people say, as if jealousy is something minor. But it’s not, it’s the worst, it’s the worst feeling there is—incoherent and confused and shameful, and at the same time self-righteous and focused and hard as glass, like the view through a telescope. A feeling of total concentration, but total powerlessness. Which must be why it inspires so much murder: killing is the ultimate control.

Telescopes and bathyscapes and sonar probes of Scottish lakes, Tacoma Narrows bridge collapse explained with abstract phase-space maps, some x-ray slides, a music score, Minard's Napoleonic war: the most exciting new frontier is charting what's already here.

Too long now things divine have been cheaply used And all the power of heaven, the kindly, spent In trifling waste by cold and cunning Men without thanks, who when he, the Highest, In person tills their field for them, think they know the daylight and the Thunderer, and indeed Their telescope may find them all, may Count and may name every star of heaven. Yet will the Father cover with holy night, That we may last on earth, our too knowing eyes. . . . Never will our Free-ranging power coerce his heaven. From “The Poet’s Vocation” (“Dichterberuf”)

A disciplined touch of June, summons Gautama’s sublime insight July’s literal aphelion, warms Francisco’s honest merriment And when august starts to tick away, Jelaluddin saunters around awake Enduring a fatuous fatigue, they are the silence we crave They are the crescent-shaped fertility, cradling the mewling of new humanity They are Tigris, kissing Baghdad, becoming tipsy on Algebra The ephemeral telescope, Euphrates, gazing at the Persian Gulf And Nile, newspaper to Cairo, overflowing with lush revelations Who is who, matters little in this mirror house As love will shorten certainty, to the most delightful doubt, erecting aesthetic, symmetric aphasia They are the three of Pi, we are what’s left behind the comma Any decimal complaints, move themselves more backward, to become the circumferential pith, birthing minor details

Gifford presented the house to Bonaguidi as a series of 'telescopic' spaces in the landscape, and his inspiration hints at the atmosphere in the Pines at this time. A telescope is a device often used for spying: it elongates when engaged in order to capture objects in its gaze.

Inside the words there was magic. I would throw open the dictionary and dive in. Words were undiscovered continents, I would swim in amongst them, hauling them up like treasures found on the seabed. They were curiosities with weight and wonder. They were telescopes and hourglasses, barnacles and periwinkles. The words would slip through my fingers like silk, like sand. There were landlubber words all granite and gumboots and there were words that caught the mystery of air, and sounds that spoke to one another like birds across the sky and I’d go foraging for them like mushrooms, watch them like waterfalls and

I do not believe that we have finished evolving. And by that, I do not mean that we will continue to make ever more sophisticated machines and intelligent computers, even as we unlock our genetic code and use our biotechnologies to reshape the human form as we once bred new strains of cattle and sheep. We have placed much too great a faith in our technology. Although we will always reach out to new technologies, as our hands naturally do toward pebbles and shells by the seashore, the idea that the technologies of our civilized life have put an end to our biological evolution—that “Man” is a finished product—is almost certainly wrong. It seems to be just the opposite. In the 10,000 years since our ancestors settled down to farm the land, in the few thousand years in which they built great civilizations, the pressures of this new way of life have caused human evolution to actually accelerate. The rate at which genes are being positively selected to engender in us new features and forms has increased as much as a hundredfold. Two genes linked to brain size are rapidly evolving. Perhaps others will change the way our brain interconnects with itself, thus changing the way we think, act, and feel. What other natural forces work transformations deep inside us? Humanity keeps discovering whole new worlds. Without, in only five centuries, we have gone from thinking that the earth formed the center of the universe to gazing through our telescopes and identifying countless new galaxies in an unimaginably vast cosmos of which we are only the tiniest speck. Within, the first scientists to peer through microscopes felt shocked to behold bacteria swarming through our blood and other tissues. They later saw viruses infecting those bacteria in entire ecologies of life living inside life. We do not know all there is to know about life. We have not yet marveled deeply enough at life’s essential miracle. How, we should ask ourselves, do the seemingly soulless elements of carbon, hydrogen, oxygen, zinc, iron, and all the others organize themselves into a fully conscious human being? How does matter manage to move itself? Could it be that an indwelling consciousness makes up the stuff of all things? Could this consciousness somehow animate the whole grand ecology of evolution, from the forming of the first stars to the creation of human beings who look out at the universe’s glittering constellations in wonder? Could consciousness somehow embrace itself, folding back on itself, in a new and natural technology of the soul? If it could, this would give new meaning to Nietzsche’s insight that: “The highest art is self–creation.” Could we, really, shape our own evolution with the full force of our consciousness, even as we might exert our will to reach out and mold a lump of clay into a graceful sculpture? What is consciousness, really? What does it mean to be human?

Observatories are built on mountains to raise them above the thick, turbulent lower levels of the atmosphere. In principle, the higher the telescope the better. In practice, the expense of building mountain roads and the severity of high-altitude weather inspires a willingness to compromise. Mauna Kea Observatory in Hawaii, which may be the highest observatory that will ever be built on Earth, stands at nearly 14,000 feet, where gale-force winds are common and the air so thin that higher brain functions are impaired by lack of oxygen. Astronomers quartered halfway down the mountain write themselves childishly simple instructions they hope their muddled brains will be able to obey when they go up to the dome to observe.

is also a book about animals as animals. Some scientists study the senses of other animals to better understand ourselves, using exceptional creatures like electric fish, bats, and owls as “model organisms” for exploring how our own sensory systems work. Others reverse-engineer animal senses to create new technologies: Lobster eyes have inspired space telescopes, the ears of a parasitic fly have influenced hearing aids, and military sonar has been honed by work on dolphin sonar. These are both reasonable motivations. I’m not interested in either. Animals are not just stand-ins for humans or fodder for brainstorming sessions. They have worth in themselves. We’ll explore their senses to better understand their lives. “They move finished and complete, gifted with extensions of the senses we have lost or never attained, living by voices we shall never hear,” wrote the American naturalist Henry Beston. “They are not brethren, they are not underlings; they are other nations, caught with ourselves in the net of life and time, fellow prisoners of the splendour and travail of the earth.

My course, navigating the sea of life, begins with a goal sighted in the lens of my telescope.

I would telescope the sheen of your gaze As an astronomer admires the night sky.

Freedom is that which comes from knowledge, the freedom that comes from curiosity, the freedom that comes from the times when the first man did not refuse to look into a telescope and discovered other planets, the freedom that comes from those who tried relentlessly when all others said it was impossible. It is in this freedom that deviance has its roots.