Quotes About Stars

We need not feel ashamed of flirting with the zodiac. The zodiac is well worth flirting with.

In the country all was dead still. Little stars shone high up; little stars spread far away in the floodwaters, a firmament below. Everywhere the vastness and terror of the immense night which is roused and stirred for a brief while by the day but which returns, and will remain at last eternal, holding everything in its silence and its living gloom. There was no Time, only Space.

On every side the immense dark silence seemed pressing him, so tiny a speck, into extinction, and yet, almost nothing, he could not be extinct. Night, in which everything was lost, went reaching out, beyond stars and sun. Stars and sun, a few bright grains, went spinning round for terror and holding each other in embrace, there in a darkness that outpassed them all and left them tiny and daunted. So much, and himself, infinitesimal, at the core a nothingness, and yet not nothing.

Through history, the powers of single black men flash here and there like falling stars, and die sometimes before the world has rightly gauged their brightness.

This is thy hour O Soul, thy free flight into the wordless, Away from books, away from art, the day erased, the lesson     done, Thee fully forth emerging, silent, gazing, pondering the     themes thou lovest best, Night, sleep, death and the stars. — Walt Whitman, "A Clear Midnight," Leaves of Grass. Originally published: July 4, 1855.

A blade of grass is the journeywork of the stars

Press close, bare-bosomed Night! Press close, magnetic, nourishing Night! Night of south winds! Night of the large, few stars! Still, nodding Night! Mad, naked, Summer Night! from Strophe 21, Song of Myself

When I, sitting, heard the astronomer, where he lectured with such applause in the lecture room, How soon, unaccountable, I became tired and sick; Till rising and gliding out, I wander'd off by myself, In the mystical moist night-air, and from time to time, Look'd up in perfect silence at the stars.

Studying life, eh! Let him take care, studying human life is looking at the stars. If you look too close, there is a dazzle.

Great is life...and real and mystical...wherever and whoever, Great is death...Sure as life holds all parts together, death holds all parts together; Sure as the stars return again after they merge on the light, death is as great as life.

I am he that walks with the tender and growing night, I call to the earth and sea half-held by the night. Press close bare-bosom'd night—press close magnetic nourishing night! Night of south winds—night of the large few stars! Still nodding night—mad naked summer night. — Walt Whitman, from "Song of Myself, 21," Leaves of Grass: The Deathbed Edition (BOMC, 1992)

After you have exhausted what there is in business, politics, conviviality, love, and so on — have found that none of these finally satisfy, or permanently wear — what remains? Nature remains; to bring out from their torpid recesses, the affinities of a man or woman with the open air, the trees, fields, the changes of seasons — the sun by day and the stars of heaven by night.

With the sentiment of the stars and moon such nights I get all the free margins and indefiniteness of music or poetry, fused in geometry's utmost exactness.

This is thy hour O Soul, thy free flight into the wordless, Away from books, away from art, the day erased, the lesson done, Thee fully forth emerging, silent, gazing, pondering the themes thou lovest best. Night, sleep, and the stars. ? Walt Whitman, "A Clear Midnight," in the section From Noon to Starry Night in the seventh edition of Leaves of Grass (1881)

Cycles ferried my cradle, rowing and rowing like cheerful boatmen; For room to me stars kept aside in their own rings, They sent influences to look after what was to hold me.

Thick-sprinkled bunting! flag of stars! Long yet your road, fateful flag—long yet your road, and lined with bloody death, For the prize I see at issue at last is the world

Night, sleep, death and the stars.

There is, in sanest hours, a consciousness, a thought that rises, independent, lifted out from all else, calm, like the stars, shining eternal

Back in 1917, when Einstein had analyzed the "cosmological considerations" arising from his general theory of relativity, most astronomers thought that the universe consisted only of our Milky Way, floating with its 100 billion or so stars in a void of empty space.

There were at least two possible explanations for the fact that distant stars in all directions seemed to be flying away from us: (1) because we are the center of the universe, something that since the time of Copernicus only our teenage children believe; (2) because the entire metric of the universe was expanding, which meant that everything was stretching out in all directions so that all galaxies were getting farther away from one another.

Man stands on this diminutive earth, gazes at the myriad stars and upon billowing oceans and tossing trees—and wonders. What does it all mean? How did it come about?

One evening at a dinner, Murray's wife asked him why he remained so cheerful given the depravity of the world. "We must remember that this is a very small star," he responded, "and probably some of the larger and more important stars may be very virtuous and happy.

We must remember that this is a very small star," he responded, "and probably some of the larger and more important stars may be very virtuous and happy."73

Some nights in the midst of this loneliness I swung among the scattered stars at the end of the thin thread of faith alone.