Repudiating the sensible world, which he neither sees himself nor believes from those who have, the Peripatetic joins combat by childish quibbling in a world on paper, and denies the Sun shines because he himself is blind.
Interpretation
This quote criticizes those who reject reality due to their personal limitations.
In this quote, Johannes Kepler highlights the folly of dismissing the objective truths of the world based on one's inability to perceive them. He uses the metaphor of blindness to illustrate how an individual's limitations can lead them to deny the existence of evident realities, revealing the absurdity of arguing against what is universally acknowledged simply because of personal inability to experience or understand it.
In practice
This quote can be used in a philosophical discussion about subjective versus objective reality.
...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]
People into hard sciences, neurophysiology, often ignore a core philosophical question: 'What is the relationship between our unique, inner experience of conscious awareness and material substance?' The answer is: We don't know, and some people are so terrified to say, 'I don't know.'
The God who gave us life, gave us liberty at the same time.
Our ancestor was an animal which breathed water, had a swim-bladder, a great swimming tail, an imperfect skull & undoubtedly was an hermaphrodite! Here is a pleasant genealogy for mankind.
For neither good nor evil can last for ever; and so it follows that as evil has lasted a long time, good must now be close at hand.
Foreign Assistance is not an end in itself. The purpose of aid must be to create the conditions where it's no longer need.
War gives the right to the conquerors to impose any condition they please upon the vanquished.
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