Home › Authors › Robert Grosseteste
Robert Grosseteste Quotes
1175–1253 England
Robert Grosseteste (c. 1175 – 1253) was an English statesman, scholastic philosopher, theologian, scientist, pastor, poet, educator and Bishop of Lincoln, Province of Canterbury, England. From about 1220 to 1235 he wrote a host of scientific treatises and was an early supporter of what was to become the scientific method.
England Academics Astronomers Educators Mathematicians Random Robert Grosseteste quote
10 quotes
Every operation in nature is in the shortest, best ordered, briefest, and best possible way.
The head is borne towards the heavens and has two lights, as it were the sun and moon.
The space of the real physical world must be considered full, that is a plenum, because a vacuum could have no physical existence.
Commentarius in VIII Libros Physicorum Aristoteles (1230)
The diligent investigator of natural phenomena can give the causes of all natural effects... by the rules and roots and foundations given from the power of geometry.
Nor is primitive matter productive of motion, because it is itself passive.
De Luce seu de Inchoatione Formarum (1215)
The first corporeal form, which some call corporeity, I hold to be light.
De Luce seu de Inchoatione Formarum (1215)
Vacuum stands and remains a mathematical space. A cube placed in a vacuum would not displace anything, as it would displace air or water in a space already containing those fluids.
Commentarius in VIII Libros Physicorum Aristoteles (1230)
Just as the light of the sun irradiates the organ of vision and things visible, enabling the former to see and the latter to be seen, so too the irradiation of a spiritual light brings the mind into relation with that which is intelligible.
In a vacuum which is imagined as infinite there cannot be local differences, both on account of its infinity, and also because of the fact that the vacuum, if it exists, would have no nature but a privation, and therefore it can have no natural differences.
Commentarius in VIII Libros Physicorum Aristoteles (1230)
Power from natural agents may go by a short line, and then in its activity greater... But if by a straight line then its action is stronger and better, as Aristotle says in Book V of the Physics, because nature operates in the shortest way possible. But the straight line is the shortest of all, as he says in the same place.
Topics Robert Grosseteste is quoted on
Works