Sky, Stars and Universe

To see the earth as we now see it, small and blue and beautiful in that eternal silence where it floats, is to see ourselves as riders on the earth together, brothers on that bright loveliness in the unending night—brothers who see now they are truly brothers.

 

Time and space are fragments of the infinite for the use of finite creatures.

There is no object on earth which cannot be looked at from a cosmic point of view.

There I lay staring upward, while the stars wheeled over... Faint to my ears came the gathered rumor of all lands: the springing and the dying, the song and the weeping, and the slow everlasting groan of overburdened stone. J. R. R.

Now lies the Earth all Danaë to the stars,

 

Give me my Romeo: and, when he shall die,

 

Of course there is nothing the matter with the stars It is my emptiness among them While they drift farther away in the invisible morning.

 

He clasps the crag with crooked hands; Close to the sun in lonely lands, Ring’d with the azure world he stands. The wrinkled sea beneath him crawls; He watches from his mountain walls, And like a thunderbolt he falls.

 

Ring out, wild bells, to the wild sky!

 

The great world’s altar-stairs, That slope through darkness up to God.

 

For I dipp’d into the future, far as human eye could see, Saw the Vision of the world, and all the wonder that would be; Saw the heavens fill with commerce, argosies of magic sails, Pilots of the purple twilight, dropping down with costly bales; Heard the heavens fill with shouting, and there rain’d a ghastly dew From the nations’ airy navies grappling in the central blue.

 

The great brand Made lightnings in the splendor of the moon, And flashing round and round, and whirled in an arch, Shot like a streamer of the northern morn, Seen where the moving isles of winter shock By night, with noises of the northern sea, So flashed and fell the brand Excalibur.

 

Viewed from the distance of the moon, theastonishing thing about the earth . . . is that it is alive. . . . Aloft, floating free beneath the moist, gleaming membrane of bright blue sky, is therising earth, the only exuberant thing in this part of the cosmos. . . . It has the organized, self-contained look of a live creature, full ofinformation, marvelously skilled in handling the sun.

A galaxy is composed of gas and dust and stars—billions upon billions of stars.

While the stars that oversprinkle

I have ... a terrible need ... shall I say the word? ... of religion. Then I go out at night and paint the stars.

Who art thou then, O my soul!" (and here [Zarathustra] became frightened, for a sunbeam shot down from heaven upon his face.""O heaven above me," said he sighing, and sat upright, "thou gazest at me? Thou hearkenest unto my strange soul?When wilt thou drink this drop of dew that fell down upon all earthly things—when wilt thou drink this strange soul——When, thou well of eternity! thou joyous, awful, noontide abyss! when wilt thou drink my soul back into thee?

The universe is merely a fleeting idea in God’s mind—a pretty uncomfortable thought, particularly if you’ve just made a down payment on a house.

If the stars should appear just one night in a thousand years, how would men believe and adore!

Be glad of life because it gives you the chance to love and to work and to play and to look up at the stars.

But of the heaven which is above the heavens, what earthly poet ever did or ever will sing worthily?

The illuminable, silent, never-resting thing called Time, rolling, rushing on, swift, silent, like an all-embracing oceantide, on which we and all the universe swim like exhalations, like apparitions which are, and then are not: this is forever very literally a miracle; a thing to strike us dumb, for we have no word to speak about it.

Though my soul may set in darkness, it will rise in perfect light;

We are all in the gutter, but some of us are looking at the stars.