Today is the birthday of Cyrano Hercule Savinien de Bergerac (March 6, 1619 – July 28, 1655), a French dramatist, soldier, satirist, and visionary. His life has been the basis of many romantic tales - the best known of them is Edmond Rostand's drama Cyrano de Bergerac (1897).He was fascinated with space travel and his novels tend to subtly criticize the anthropocentric view of man's place in creation (as well as the social injustices of the 17th century). His work was censored and banned, especially his novel The Other World.
"I think the Moon is a world like this one, and the Earth is its moon. . . My friends greeted this with a burst of laughter. "And maybe," I told them, "someone on the Moon is even now making fun of someone else who says that our globe is a world." - Cyrano de Bergerac
"Most men judge only by their senses and let themselves be persuaded by what they see. Just as the man whose boat sails from shore to shore thinks he is stationary and that the shore moves, men turn with the earth under the sky and have believed that the sky was turning above them. On top of that, insufferable vanity has convinced humans that nature has been made only for them, as though the sun, a huge body four hundred and thirty-four times as large as the earth, had been lit only to ripen our crab apples and cabbages." - Cyrano de Bergerac
"I think the Moon is a world like this one, and the Earth is its moon. . . My friends greeted this with a burst of laughter. "And maybe," I told them, "someone on the Moon is even now making fun of someone else who says that our globe is a world." - Cyrano de Bergerac
"Most men judge only by their senses and let themselves be persuaded by what they see. Just as the man whose boat sails from shore to shore thinks he is stationary and that the shore moves, men turn with the earth under the sky and have believed that the sky was turning above them. On top of that, insufferable vanity has convinced humans that nature has been made only for them, as though the sun, a huge body four hundred and thirty-four times as large as the earth, had been lit only to ripen our crab apples and cabbages." - Cyrano de Bergerac
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