It took me ages today to find a specific snippet in Latin. I'm looking for a better title for a work-in-progress piece of fiction, and there was a quote I mostly remembered in English from Johannes Kepler's Dissertatio cum Nuncio Sidereo ("Conversation with the Starry Messenger") where he responds to a recent publication by Galileo. It's from a passage speculating about the future of space flight, which I had seen given as something like:
Given ships and sails suitable for the heavenly wind, there will be those who will not fear even that void.
I could not find a version of the original Latin text of Dissertatio cum Nuncio Sidereo that had been transcribed into ASCII, so I couldn't just search: I had to rely on flipping through the pages of scanned PDFs in bad website-based browsers until I could find the relevant passage. It turns out the original Latin is
Da naves, aut vela caelesti aurae accommoda, erunt qui ne ab illa quidem vastitate sibi metuant.
which is not nearly as pithy as I'd hoped—which I guess is par for the course for 17th-century scientific Latin—and also comes after a kind of entertaining paragraph where Kepler reasons, "Well, there might be people already living on Jupiter and the Moon! And if there aren't, well, we thought crossing the Pacific was gonna be hard, but it turns out to be smoother sailing than going across the channels once you get out in the middle of it. Maybe it's gonna be just as easy to travel through outer space! Anyway, because of that, we should definitely continue mapping the Moon and Jupiter."
