AstroQuotes
"We are all in the gutter but some of us are looking at the stars."
Oscar Wilde
"The diversity of the phenomena of Nature is so great, and the treasures hidden in the heavens so rich,
precisely in order that the human mind shall never be lacking in fresh nourishment."
Johannes Kepler
Mysterium Cosmographicum
"It is better to shoot for the stars and miss than aim for a pile of manure and hit it."
Anonymous
"Look skyward now...and see above...INFINITY.
Vast and dark and deep and endless...your heritage:
Silent clouds of stars, other worlds uncountable and other suns beyond numbering.
Realms of fire-mist and star-cities as grains of sand...drifting...Across the ages."
Robert Burnham, Jr.
"Deep sky is, of all visual impressions, the nearest akin to a feeling."
Samual Taylor Coleridge
"Who, my friend, can scale the heaven?"
-The Epic of Gilgamesh
"What seest thou else in the dark backward and abysm of time?"
Wm. Shakespeare
The Tempest
"Unto what shall I liken these kingdoms, that ye may understand?
Behold, all these kingdoms, and any man who hath seen any or the least of these
hath seen God moving in his majesty and power."
D&C 88:42-47
"We have loved the stars too fondly to be fearful of the night"
Tombstone epitaph of two amateur astronomers quoted in Cosmos, Sagan, p.195
"Astronomy is one of the sublimest fields of human investigation.
The mind that grasps its facts and principles receives something of the
enlargement and grandeur belonging to the science itself. It is a quickener of devotion."
Horace Mann
"No one can contemplate the great facts of astronomy without feeling his own littleness
and the wonderful sweep of the power and providence of God."
Tryon Edwards
"An undevout astronomer is mad."
Young
" It may be sat down as indisputable, if the mind of a child cannot be excited to inquiry,
by explaining the dimensions, distances, and revolutions of the planets,
there is a vacuum that can never be filled."
William Phelps
"Astronomy compels the soul to look upwards and leads us from this world to another."
Plato, The Republic, VII, 529
"Farewell, Morning Star, herald of dawn, and quickly come as the Evening Star,
bringing again in secret her whom thou takest away."
Meleager Greek Anthology, J.W. Mackail, Sec. 1, no. 21
"Many years ago the great British explorer George Mallory, who was to die on Mount Everest,
was asked why did he want to climb it. He said "Because it is there."
Well, space is there, and we're going to climb it, and the moon and the planets are there,
and new hopes for knowledge and peace are there."
John F. Kennedy
"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."
Archibald Macleish
"He who can look upon the firmament in a cloudless night, with a soul untouched,
must be wholly incapable of relishing any intellectual food.
If there be any safe criterion to prove the depth of the mind,
it may unhesitatingly be said, Astronomy."
William Phelps
"When it is dark enough you can see the stars."
Ralph Waldo Emerson
"For now we see through a glass, darkly..."
I Corinthians 13:12
"It is theory that decides what we can observe."
Albert Einstein
O star (the fairest one in sight),
We grant your loftiness the right
To some obscurity of cloud-
it will not due to say of night,
since dark is what brings out your light.
Say something! And it says "I burn"
But say with what degree of heat.
Talk Fahrenheit, talk Centigrade.
Use language we can comprehend.
Tell us what elements you blend...
Robert Frost
Take Something Like A Star
"I like to find what's not found at once,
but lies within something of another nature
in repose, distinct."
Denise Levertov
Pleasures
"Look how the floor of heaven
Is thick inlaid with patines of bright gold!
There's not the smallest orb which thou behold'st,
But in his motion like an angel sings,
Still quiring to the young eyed cherubims:
Such harmony is in immortal souls;
But while this muddy vesture of decay doth grossly close it in
we can not hear it."
William Shakespear
Merchant of Venice Act V Scene 1.
"This is the excellent foppery of the world!
That when we are sick in fortune
(often the surfeit of our own behaviour),
we make guilty the sun, the moon and stars....."
William Shakespear
King Lear Act 1 Scene 2
"One cannot help but be in awe when he contemplates
the mysteries of eternity, of life,
of the marvelous structure of reality."
Albert Einstein
Do you have any favorite quotes relating to astronomy? Send to: jpat@srv.net
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