Controversial Sayings

God's singular decree is the cause of Adam's fall, and through this fall, the damnation of his posterity.

The elect alone receive through regeneration [grace]. For I stay not to consider the extravagance of those who say that grace is offered equally and promiscuously to all.

The fact that infants who die before baptism are damned is a dreadful decree, but no one can deny that God foreknew what end man was to have before he created him.

It is not in vain that he banishes all those human affections which soften our hearts; that he commands paternal love and all the benevolent feelings between brothers, relations, and friends to cease; in a word, that he almost deprives men of their n…

Let us also learn that nothing is less consistent than to punish heavily the crimes whereby mortals are injured, whilst we connive at the impious errors or sacrilegious modes of worship whereby the majesty of God is violated.

For a long time I was restless. Now, however, behold how through my effort God is being celebrated in astronomy.

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.

So long as the mother, Ignorance, lives, it is not safe for Science, the offspring, to divulge the hidden causes of things.

Some of what these pamphlets [of astrological forecasts] say will turn out to be true, but most of it time and experience will expose as empty and worthless. The latter part will be forgotten [literally: written on the winds] while the former will be…

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

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.

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…

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.

My goal is to show that the heavenly machine is not a kind of divine living being but similar to a clockwork insofar as all the manifold motions are taken care of by one single absolutely simple magnetic bodily force, as in a clockwork all motion is …

Provide ship or sails adapted to the heavenly breezes, and there will be some who will not fear even that void [of space]… . So, for those who will come shortly to attempt this journey, let us establish the astronomy: Galileo, you of Jupiter, I of th…

God gives every animal the means of saving its life—why object if he gives astrology to the astronomer?

We may lay it down as an incontestible axiom, that, in all the operations of art and nature, nothing is created; an equal quantity of matter exists both before and after the experiment; the quality and quantity of the elements remain precisely the sa…

As ideas are preserved and communicated by means of words, it necessarily follows that we cannot improve the language of any science, without at the same time improving the science itself; neither can we, on the other hand, improve a science without …

Here, then: a revolution [in science and chemistry] has taken place in an important part of human knowledge since your departure from Europe… I will consider this revolution to be well advanced and even completely accomplished if you range yourself w…

Imagination, on the contrary, which is ever wandering beyond the bounds of truth, joined to self-love and that self-confidence we are so apt to indulge, prompt us to draw conclusions which are not immediately derived from facts.