Quotes About Light

Darkness may cover light, but that is not the same thing as putting it out. Whereas, to overcome darkness, all light need do is to exist.

Worry in the dark can make it even darker.

The poplars were a symbol. It was only the light from behind the poplars that made their silhouettes visible.

The light extends like truth, the truth like a hand extending at the same time as it recedes. What is that like?

Radiance unrelenting— no peace, no shadow, no shelter now—

Star-in-the-hand Cupped fire Fist, luminous.

There's a light that can make finding a thing look more than faintly like falling across it—you must kneel, make an offering. I threw my compass away years ago. I have passed through that light. —Carl Phillips, from "That it Might Save, or Drown Them", Wild is the West (?Farrar, Straus and Giroux (January 23, 2018)

Dawn begins pushing back the covers of night and the sun rolls out of bed.

When we look up at night and view the stars, everything we see is shinning because of distant nuclear fusion.

The near side of a galaxy is tens of thousands of light-years closer to us than the far side; thus we see the front as it was tens of thousands of years before the back. But typical events in galactic dynamics occupy tens of millions of years, so the error in thinking of an image of a galaxy as frozen in one moment of time is small.

Every star may be a sun to someone.

We sometimes hear of things that can travel faster than light. Something called 'the speed of thought' is occasionally proffered. This is an exceptionally silly notion especially since the speed of impulses through the neutrons in our brain is about the same as the speed of a donkey cart.

Maturity entails a readiness, painful and wrenching though it may be, to look squarely into the long dark places, into the fearsome shadows. In this act of ancestral remembrance and acceptance may be found a light by which to see our children safely home.

Cosmos is closed and light cannot escape from it, then it may be perfectly correct to describe the universe as a black hole. If you wish to know what it is like inside a black hole, look around you.

He sought a way to preserve the past. John Hershel was one of the founders of a new form of time travel.... a means to capture light and memories. He actually coined a word for it... photography. When you think about it, photography is a form of time travel. This man is staring at us from across the centuries, a ghost preserved by light.

A stars rich in europium; of distant galaxies analyzed through the collective light of a hundred billion constituent stars. Astronomical spectroscopy is an almost magical technique. It amazes me still. Auguste Comte picked a particularly unfortunate example.

Cuando la gravedad es lo bastante elevada no deja escapar nada, ni siquiera la luz. Un lugar así recibe el nombre de agujero negro. Es una especie de gato cósmico de Chesire, enigmáticamente indiferente a lo que le rodea.

Assim como as crianças tremem e têm medo de tudo na escuridão cega, também nós, à claridade da luz, às vezes tememos o que não deveria inspirar mais temor do que as coisas que aterrorizam as crianças no escuro... Lucrécio, Sobre a natureza das coisas (cerca de 60 a.C.)

Einstein's prohibition against travelling faster than light may clash with our common sense, but, on this question, why should we trust common sense? Why should our experience at 10 kilometers-an-hour constrain the laws of nature at 300,000 kilomters per second? Relativity does set limits on what humans can ultimately do, but the universe is not required to be in perfect harmony with human ambition.

Einstein had been fascinated by Bernstein's People's Book of Natural Science, a popularization of science that described on its very first page the astonishing speed of electricity through wires and light through space. He wondered what the world would look like if you could travel on a wave of light. To travel at the speed of light? What an engaging and magical thought for a boy on the road in a countryside dappled and rippling in sunlight.

The candle flame gutters. Its little pool of light trembles. Darkness gathers. The demons begin to stir.

But if the Cosmos is closed and light cannot escape from it, then it may be perfectly correct to deceive the universe as a black hole. If you wish to know what it is like inside a black hole, look around you.

I went to the librarian and asked for a book about stars... and the answer was stunning. It was that the Sun was a star but really close. The stars were suns, but so far away they were just little points of light. The scale of the universe suddenly opened up to me. It was a kind of religious experience. There was a magnificence to it, a grandeur, a scale which has never left me. Never ever left me.

And then the searchlight which had been turned on the world was turned off again, and never for one moment since has there been any light that's stronger than this-kitchen-candle...