Galileo Galilei

Italian polymath (1564–1642)

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Lived 1564–1642, aged 78Italy

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Wikipedia
209 languages
Cross-language footprint
Global rank
#35
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Era
1564–1642
Aged 78
Awards
1
recognised work

Summary

Updated 2026-08-27

He turned a telescope to the sky and saw moons circling Jupiter, phases on Venus, mountains on our own — then spent his last years locked in his house for saying the Earth moves.

Biography

About

Born in Pisa in 1564, Galileo studied motion, gravity, pendulums, built thermoscopes and military compasses, then improved the telescope and aimed it up. What he saw — Jupiter's four largest moons, Saturn's rings, the stars of the Milky Way, sunspots, lunar craters — fed his support for Copernican heliocentrism, the idea that Earth orbits the sun. The Roman Inquisition investigated in 1615 and declared his views contradicted scripture. In 1632 his Dialogue Concerning the Two Chief World Systems appeared to mock Pope Urban VIII, alienating both the Pope and the Jesuits who had backed him. The I…

Voice

In their own words

Sourced, dated quotes from Galileo Galilei

Galileo Galilei

said1633

I am certainly interested in a tribunal in which, for having used my reason, I was deemed little less than a heretic.

— p. 244

Galileo Galilei

said1632

It always seems to me extreme rashness on the part of some when they want to make human abilities the measure of what nature can do.

— Day One

Galileo Galilei

said1632

If you could see the earth illuminated when you were in a place as dark as night, it would look to you more splendid than the moon.

— Salviati, p. 88

Galileo Galilei

said1632

Among all the great men who have philosophized about this remarkable effect, I am more astonished at Kepler than at any other.

— In regard to Kepler's belief of the moon affecting the tides of the Earth, p. 328

Galileo Galilei

said1632

The sun, with all those planets revolving around it and dependent on it, can still ripen a bunch of grapes as if it had nothing else in the universe to do.

— Loose paraphrase of Salviati on Day 3: "For when the sun draws up some vapors here, or warms a plant there, it draws these and warms this

via Wikiquote · CC BY-SA

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