Quotes About Cosmos

Thomas Berry, in The Dream of the Earth,

Canst thou bind the sweet influences of Pleiades, or loose the bands of Orion

he remained enthralled by the sublimely ordered Ptolemaic cosmos in which 'we do not see, like Meredith's Lucifer, the army of unalterable law but rather the revelry of insatiable love.' He conceded that it was not 'true'; but in his last, perhaps his most provocative, pages, claimed that all 'models' of the universe reflect as much the psychology of an age as the current state of knowledge.

Don't forget about the stardust. Don't forget about the quartz rocks in the woods. You are small. But you are also so much more.

It made her think about how she couldn't believe how big the universe was, but how small it was for her.

We are just stardust after all.

It made her think about how she couldn't believe how big the universe was, but how small it was for her

So many stars are popping out above us it seems you could almost dip your fingers up there and come out with a handful of stars.

That is what all creatures great and small are made of. Leftover stardust. An atom exploded, and all the dust became the planets, the stars...and us. That's all anything amounts to.

She actually liked the idea that she might be made out of stars.

So many stars are popping out above us it seems you could almost dip your fingers up there and come out with a handful of diamonds.

Not only is the universe stranger than we think. It's stranger than we can think.

What distant star had to explode to seed our world with inspiration?

This is the essence of emergence: tiny units of matter operating collectively to become something much more than themselves, to enable the cosmos to know itself.

As a child, when I first heard the story of Creation, I'd closed my eyes and pictured the earth as a ball rolling off the palm of God and into dark space, then drifting around until it found its home in sunny orbit. Never perfect, but ever spinning, and holding on to her course, despite it all.

All over the world, people are looking at the same stars, the same moon, the same sun, every day. Somehow, I didn't feel so isolated when I thought of it that way.

Morihei Ueshiba, founder of Aikido, stated: Rise early in the morning to greet the sun. Inhale and let yourself soar to the ends of the universe; breathe out and let the cosmos inside. Next breathe up the fe- cundity and vibrance of the Earth. Blend the breath of Earth with your own and become the breath of life it- self. Your mind and body will be gladdened, depression and heartache will dissipate and you will be filled with gratitude.5

Addiction is a bargain with the cosmos: only stay time, and I'll remain in this holding pattern, too. The uncrossable gap between now and the past is given tangible form and conquered, daily, in the real but bridgeable gap between what I need and what I can get. Addiction creates a god so that time will stop--why all gods are created. God might be another story.

I consider the luck of simply being born, of being plucked out of the cosmos and bestowed with eyes to see, and nerves to feel, and ears to hear. Our senses. Our speech. Our breath. How crucial and insistent our ceaseless moving lungs from our first cry to our last.

The Big Dipper wheels on its bowl. In years hence it will have stopped looking like a saucepan and will resemble a sugar scoop as the earth continues to wobble and the dipper's seven stars speed in different directions.

I didn't know that the moon was in on everything.

What hand unseen Impells me onward through the glowing orbs Of habitable nature, far remote, To the dread confines of eternal night, To solitudes of vast unpeopled space, To deserts of creation, wide and wild; Where embryo systems and unkindled suns Sleep in the womb of chaos?

Is there not A tongue in every star that talks with man, And wooes him to be wise? nor wooes in vain; This dead of midnight is the noon of thought, And wisdom mounts her zenith with the stars.

Gods above and below