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Giordano Bruno
(1548 - 17 Feb 1600)
Italian philosopher, astronomer, mathematician and occultist whose theories anticipated modern science.
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Science Quotes by Giordano Bruno (5 quotes)
I await your sentence with less fear than you pass it. The time will come when all will see what I see.
— Giordano Bruno
In Robert L. Weber, More Random Walks in Science (1982), 50.
The universe is then one, infinite, immobile. ... It is not capable of comprehension and therefore is endless and limitless, and to that extent infinite and indeterminable, and consequently immobile.
— Giordano Bruno
In Giordano Bruno and Jack Lindsay, 'Fifth Dialogue', Cause, Principle, and Unity: Five Dialogues (1976), 135.
There is a single general space, a single vast immensity which we may freely call void: in it are unnumerable globes like this on which we live and grow, this space we declare to be infinite, since neither reason, convenience, sense-perception nor nature assign to it a limit.
— Giordano Bruno
Quoted in Joseph Silk, The Big Bang (1997), 89.
To a body of infinite size there can be ascribed neither center nor boundary ... Just as we regard ourselves as at the center of that universally equidistant circle, which is the great horizon and the limit of our own encircling ethereal region, so doubtless the inhabitants of the moon believe themselves to be at the center (of a great horizon) that embraces this earth, the sun, and the stars, and is the boundary of the radii of their own horizon. Thus the earth no more than any other world is at the center; moreover no points constitute determined celestial poles for our earth, just as she herself is not a definite and determined pole to any other point of the ether, or of the world-space; and the same is true for all other bodies. From various points of view these may all be regarded either as centers, or as points on the circumference, as poles, or zeniths and so forth. Thus the earth is not in the center of the universe; it is central only to our own surrounding space.
— Giordano Bruno
Irving Louis Horowitz, The Renaissance Philosophy of Giordano Bruno (1952), 60.
Unless you make yourself equal to God, you cannot understand God: for the like is not intelligible save to the like. Make yourself grow to a greatness beyond measure, by a bound free yourself from the body; raise yourself above all time, become Eternity; then you will understand God. Believe that nothing is impossible for you, think yourself immortal and capable of understanding all, all arts, all sciences, the nature of every living being. Mount higher than the highest height; descend lower than the lowest depth. Draw into yourself all sensations of everything created, fire and water, dry and moist, imagining that you are everywhere, on earth, in the sea, in the sky, that you are not yet born, in the maternal womb, adolescent, old, dead, beyond death. If you embrace in your thought all things at once, times, places, substances, qualities, quantities, you may understand God.
— Giordano Bruno
Quoted in F. A. Yales, Giordano Bruno and the Hermetic Tradition (1964), 198.
See also:
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17 Feb - short biography, births, deaths and events on date of Bruno's death.
Cause, Principle, and Unity: Five Dialogues, by Bruno Giordano. - book suggestion.
Booklist for Giordano Bruno.

At the heart of science is an essential balance between two seemingly contradictory attitudes--an openness to new ideas, no matter how bizarre or counterintuitive they may be, and the most ruthless skeptical scrutiny of all ideas, old and new. This is how deep truths are winnowed from deep nonsense. -- Carl Sagan