What has philosophy got to do with measuring anything? It's the mathematicians you have to trust, and they measure the skies like we measure a field. - Galileo Galilei

This vain presumption of understanding everything can have no other basis than never understanding anything.

Persisting in their original resolve to destroy me and everything mine by any means they can think of, these men are aware of my views in astronomy and philosophy. They know that as to the arrangement of the parts of the universe, I hold the sun to be situated motionless in the center of the revolution of the celestial orbs while the earth revolves about the sun. They know also that I support this position not only by refuting the arguments of Ptolemy and Aristotle, but by producing many counter-arguments; in particular, some which relate to physical effects whose causes can perhaps be assigned in no other way. In addition there are astronomical arguments derived from many things in my new celestial discoveries that plainly confute the Ptolemaic system while admirably agreeing with and confirming the contrary hypothesis.

"E pur si muove."

(And yet it moves.)

(What Galileo purportedly muttered after torturers forced him to recant his theory that the earth orbits the sun.)