Astrology Quotes

This is the excellent foppery of the world: that when we are sick in fortune—often the surfeits of our own behaviour—we make guilty of our disasters the sun, the moon, and stars, as if we were villains on necessity, fools by heavenly compulsion, knaves, thieves, and treachers by spherical predominance, drunkards, liars, and adulterers by an enforced obedience of planetary influence.... An admirable evasion of whoremaster man, to lay his goatish disposition on the charge of a star!
- William Shakespeare (1564–1616), British dramatist and poet.

Superstition is to religion what astrology is to astronomy—the mad daughter of a wise mother. These daughters have too long dominated the earth.
- Voltaire [François Marie Arouet] (1694–1778), French enlightenment thinker.

Astronomy to the selfish becomes astrology.
- Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882), U.S. essayist, poet and philosopher.

I can see no justification whatever for the attitude which refuses on purely a priori grounds to accept action at a distance … Such an attitude bespeaks an unimaginativeness, a mental obtuseness and obstinacy.
- P. W. Bridgman (1882–1961), American Nobel prize-winning physicist.

Men, forever tempted to lift the veil of the future—with the aid of computers or horoscopes or the intestines of sacrificial animals—have a worse record to show in these “sciences” than in almost any scientific endeavor.
- Hannah Arendt (1906–1975), U.S. philosopher and political theorist.

The too much contemplation of these limits induces meanness. They who talk much of destiny, their birth-star, &c., are in a lower dangerous plane, and invite the evils they fear.
- Ralph Waldo Emerson

About astrology and palmistry: they are good because they make people vivid and full of possibilities. They are communism at its best. Everybody has a birthday and almost everybody has a palm.
- Kurt Vonnegut, Jr. (b. 1922), U.S. novelist.

Faithful horoscope-watching, practiced daily, provides just the sort of small but warm and infinitely reassuring fillip that gets matters off to a spirited start.
- Shana Alexander (b. 1925), U.S. writer and editor.