Quote of the day, mostly related to astronomy.

[messier 111]

If you fell down yesterday, stand up today.
H. G. Wells

[messier 111]

“Look again at that dot. That's here. That's home. That's us. On it everyone you love, everyone you know, everyone you ever heard of, every human being who ever was, lived out their lives. The aggregate of our joy and suffering, thousands of confident religions, ideologies, and economic doctrines, every hunter and forager, every hero and coward, every creator and destroyer of civilization, every king and peasant, every young couple in love, every mother and father, hopeful child, inventor and explorer, every teacher of morals, every corrupt politician, every "superstar," every "supreme leader," every saint and sinner in the history of our species lived there--on a mote of dust suspended in a sunbeam.”
― Carl Sagan, Pale Blue Dot: A Vision of the Human Future in Space

[messier 111]

A mind that is stretched by a new experience can never go back to its old dimensions.
Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr.

[messier 111]

The starting point of all achievement is desire.
Napoleon Hill

[messier 111]

Nothing in life is to be feared, it is only to be understood. Now is the time to understand more, so that we may fear less.
Marie Curie

[messier 111]

What is a teacher? I'll tell you: it isn't someone who teaches something, but someone who inspires the student to give of her best in order to discover what she already knows.
Paulo Coelho

[messier 111]

“Any patch of sunlight in a wood will show you something about the sun which you could never get from reading books on astronomy. These pure and spontaneous pleasures are ‘patches of Godlight’ in the woods of our experience.”
― C.S. Lewis

[messier 111]

“At the very moment that humans discovered the scale of the universe and found that their most unconstrained fancies were in fact dwarfed by the true dimensions of even the Milky Way Galaxy, they took steps that ensured that their descendants would be unable to see the stars at all. For a million years humans had grown up with a personal daily knowledge of the vault of heaven. In the last few thousand years they began building and emigrating to the cities. In the last few decades, a major fraction of the human population has abandoned a rustic way of life. As technology developed and the cities were polluted, the nights became starless. New generations grew to maturity wholly ignorant of the sky that had transfixed their ancestors and that had stimulated the modern age of science and technology. Without even noticing, just as astronomy entered a golden age most people cut themselves off from the sky, a cosmic isolationism that ended only with the dawn of space exploration.”
― Carl Sagan, Contact

[messier 111]

Success depends upon previous preparation, and without such preparation there is sure to be failure.
Confucius

[messier 111]

Belief in oneself is one of the most important bricks in building any successful venture.
Lydia M. Child

[notFritzArgelander]

Belief in oneself is one of the most important bricks in building any successful venture.
Lydia M. Child

The only problem is when belief is so strong it ignores evidence.

[messier 111]

You don't learn to walk by following rules. You learn by doing, and by falling over.
Richard Branson

[messier 111]

“We ought to regard the present state of the universe as the effect of its antecedent state and as the cause of the state that is to follow. An intelligence knowing all the forces acting in nature at a given instant, as well as the momentary positions of all things in the universe, would be able to comprehend in one single formula the motions of the largest bodies as well as the lightest atoms in the world, provided that its intellect were sufficiently powerful to subject all data to analysis; to it nothing would be uncertain, the future as well as the past would be present to its eyes. The perfection that the human mind has been able to give to astronomy affords but a feeble outline of such an intelligence.”
― Pierre Simon de Laplace

[messier 111]

Experience is simply the name we give our mistakes.
Oscar Wilde

[messier 111]

The meaning of life is to find your gift. The purpose of life is to give it away.
Pablo Picasso

[messier 111]

One person with passion is better than forty people merely interested.
E. M. Forster

[messier 111]

“The story so far:
In the beginning the Universe was created.
This has made a lot of people very angry and been widely regarded as a bad move.”
― Douglas Adams, The Restaurant at the End of the Universe

[notFritzArgelander]

One person with passion is better than forty people merely interested.
E. M. Forster

OTOH forty people with passion was the makings of the Beer Hall Putsch.

I’m thinking of WB Yeats poem “The Second Coming”

The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.

https://poets.org/poem/second-coming

[messier 111]

“I refuse to answer that question on the grounds that I don't know the answer”
― Douglas Adams

[messier 111]

“Dark matter has a gravitation effect on other objects. You can't see it, you can't feel it, but you can watch something being pulled in its direction.”
― Jodi Picoult, My Sister's Keeper