It may be well to wait a century for a reader, as God has waited six thousand years for an observer.
Interpretation
Kepler suggests that patience is essential in both creation and discovery.
This quote illustrates the idea that significant discoveries and understanding in science and beyond require time and patience. Just as God has waited for millennia for humanity to observe and comprehend the universe, we too must be patient in our pursuits, knowing that meaningful insights can take generations to emerge.
In practice
In a lecture about scientific methods, one could use this quote to emphasize the importance of patience in research.
...Those laws are within the grasp of the human mind. God wanted us to recognize them by creating us after his own image so that we could share in his own thoughts... and if piety allow us to say so, our understanding is in this respect of the same kind as the divine, at least as far as we are able to grasp something of it in our mortal life.
A most unfailing experience... of the excitement of sublunary (that is, human) natures by the conjunctions and aspects of the planets has instructed and compelled my unwilling belief.
We find, therefore, under this orderly arrangement, a wonderful symmetry in the universe, and a definite relation of harmony in the motion and magnitude of the orbs, of a kind that is not possible to obtain in any other way.
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. 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 him.
Eyesight should learn from reason.
I measured the skies, now the shadows I measure, Sky-bound was the mind, earth-bound the body rests. [Kepler's epitaph]
In space, you need to exercise your heart since it's not pumping blood around at the same rate.
But the first the general public learned about the discovery was the news of the destruction of Hiroshima by the atom bomb. A splendid achievement of science and technology had turned malign. Science became identified with death and destruction.
Perhaps in ten thousand years, the starry sky that humankind gazes upon will remain empty and silent. But perhaps tomorrow we'll wake up and find an alien spaceship the size of the Moon parked in orbit.
It will free man from the remaining chains, the chains of gravity which still tie him to this planet.
The true laboratory is the mind, where behind illusions we uncover the laws of truth.
[Decoding the human genome sequence] is the most significant undertaking that we have mounted so far in an organized way in all of science. I believe that reading our blueprints, cataloguing our own instruction book, will be judged by history as more significant than even splitting the atom or going to the moon.
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