quotations about stars
If the stars should appear one night in a thousand years, how would men believe and adore; and preserve for many generations the remembrance of the city of God which had been shown! But every night come out these envoys of beauty, and light the universe with their admonishing smile.
RALPH WALDO EMERSON
Nature and Selected Essays
When I gaze into the stars, they look down upon me with pity from their serene and silent spaces, like eyes glistening with tears over the little lot of man; thousands of generations, all as noisy as our own, have been swallowed up by time, and there remains no record of them any more.
THOMAS CARLYLE
attributed, The Ladies Companion, 1853
The nitrogen in our DNA, the calcium in our teeth, the iron in our blood, the carbon in our apple pies were made in the interiors of collapsing stars. We are made of starstuff.
CARL SAGAN
Cosmos
In many ways stars are like living beings. They're born; they live; they die. And they even have a heartbeat. Using a novel technique, astronomers have detected thousands of stellar "pulses" in the galaxy Messier 87 (M87). Their measurements offer a new way of determining a galaxy's age.
HARVARD-SMITHSONIAN CENTER FOR ASTROPHYSICS
"Discovery measures 'heartbeats' of a distant galaxy's stars", Astronomy Now, November 16, 2015
The pale stars are gone!
For the sun, their swift shepherd,
To their folds them compelling,
In the depths of the dawn,
Hastes, in meteor-eclipsing array, and the flee
Beyond his blue dwelling,
As fawns flee the leopard.
PERCY BYSSHE SHELLEY
Prometheus Unbound
The glitter in the sky looks as if I could scoop it all up in my hands and let the stars swirl and touch one another but they are so distant so very far apart that they cannot feel the warmth of each other even though they are made of burning.
BETH REVIS
Across the Universe
A philosopher once asked, "Are we human because we gaze at the stars, or do we gaze at them because we are human?" Pointless, really... "Do the stars gaze back?" Now, that's a question.
NEIL GAIMAN
Stardust
Induction warrants the opinion that the planets and the stars are tenanted, or are to be tenanted, by inhabitants endowed with reason; for though man is but a newcomer upon earth, the lower animals had appeared through unnumbered ages, like a long twilight before the day.
GEORGE BANCROFT
The Necessity, the Reality, and the Promise of the Progress of the Human Race
What is between the star and the sea?
A bird as bright as a bird can be
What is between the bird and me?
Only a star, only the sea
THE WATERBOYS
"The Star and the Sea"
Stars are like notes on a gigantic celestial score which produced a harmonious arrangement/tune that we all are moved by.
DAMANEK
"Damanek see stars in video for The Cosmic Score", TeamRock, July 17, 2017
The moon grew hungry, thinner and thinner, until she was just a slice of herself, and her tips were as sharp as a knife. By accident, because that is the way most things happen, she poked a hole in the night and out spilled a million stars, like a fountain of tears.
JODI PICOULT
My Sister's Keeper
Not just beautiful, though--the stars are like the trees in the forest, alive and breathing. And they're watching me.
HARUKI MURAKAMI
Kafka on the Shore
Cause you're a sky cause you're a sky full of stars
I want to die in your arms
Cause you get lighter the more it gets dark
I'm gonna give you my heart
COLDPLAY
"A Sky Full of Stars"
I like the stars. It's the illusion of permanence, I think. I mean, they're always flaring up and caving in and going out. But from here, I can pretend ... I can pretend that things last.
NEIL GAIMAN
The Sandman, Vol. 7: Brief Lives
Stars are like dynamic balancing acts between two forces: fusion and gravity.
EVAN GOUGH
"Chance Discovery of a Three Hour Old Supernova", Universe Today, February 14, 2017
But best of all, in deep embracing interstellar spaces
Beyond the sky-lid, free of every limit,
To float forever marvelling
Through endless symphonies of stars!
SHRADDHAVAN
"Deep Places", Stars in the Soup and other poems
These stars say something very significant to all of us, and each man has the whole hemisphere of them, if he will look up, to counsel and befriend him.
SIR ISAAC NEWTON
attributed, Day's Collacon
So many stars
The wind is filled with songs
So many songs which one is mine
One must be right for me
Which song of all the songs
When there's a song for every star
TONY BENNETT
"So Many Stars"
Cry out upon the stars for doing
Ill offices, to cross their wooing.
SAMUEL BUTLER
Hudibras
Now glowed the firmament
With living sapphires; Hesperus, that led
The starry host, rode brightest, till the Moon,
Rising in clouded majesty, at length
Apparent queen, unveiled her peerless light,
And o'er the dark her silver mantle threw.
JOHN MILTON
Paradise Lost