Firmament Quotes - Page 3

• He who desires to see the living God face-to-face should not seek him in the empty, firmament of his mind, but in human love.

  Fyodor Dostoevsky

  Mind, Desire, Faces

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• But now I rejoice when, in my winter studio, I can spread out my summer studies and recall through them the beautiful season and places which gave them being. Here the painter feels how small things may suggest the greater - the drop of water, image the firmament.

  Christopher Pearse Cranch

  Beautiful, Summer, Winter

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• The love of fame is too high and delicate a feeling in the mind to be mixed up with realities, it is a solitary abstraction. * * * A name "fast anchored in the deep abyss of time" is like a star twinkling in the firmament, cold, silent, distant, but eternal and sublime; and our transmitting one to posterity is as if we should contemplate our translation to the skies.

  William Hazlitt

  Stars, Reality, Sky

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• For where's the State beneath the Firmament,
  That doth excell the Bees for Government?

  Guillaume de Salluste Du Bartas

  Government, Bees, States

  Josuah Sylvester, Guillaume de Salluste Du Bartas (seigneur), Gui Du Faur de Pibrac, Odet de La Noue (seigneur de Téligny), Henry Smith (1967). “The Complete Works of Joshuah Sylvester: For the First Time Collected and Edited”

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• As long as the firmament of the You is spread over me, the tempests of causality cower at my heels, and whirl of doom congeals.

  Martin Buber

  Long, Causality, Tempest

  Martin Buber (2013). “I and Thou”, p.78, eBookIt.com

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• Lord Bacon has compared those who move in higher spheres to those heavenly bodies in the firmament, which have much admiration, but little rest. And it is not necessary to invest a wise man with power to convince him that it is a garment bedizened with gold, which dazzles the beholder by its splendor, but oppresses the wearer by its weight.

  Charles Caleb Colton

  Wise, Moving, Men

  Charles Caleb Colton (1832). “Lacon: Or Many Things in Few Words, Addressed to Those who Think”, p.94

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• The most brilliant flashes of wit come from a clouded mind, as lightning leaps only from an obscure firmament.

  Christian Nestell Bovee

  Mind, Lightning, Brilliant

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• Thoughts give birth to a creative force that is neither elemental nor sidereal. Thoughts create a new heaven, a new firmament, a new source of energy, from which new arts flow. When a man undertakes to create something, he establishes a new heaven.

  Paracelsus

  Art, New Beginnings, Men

  Paracelsus (1951). “Selected Writings”, p.45, Princeton University Press

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• And before my Soul took me to task I was hard of hearing; I heard only tumult and uproar. But now I am all ears listening to the silence and its choirs singing the hymns of time, intoning the praises of the firmament, revealing the secrets of the invisible.

  Khalil Gibran

  Inspiration, Hymns, Addiction

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• Indian business women like Indra Nooyi, Chanda Kochhar, Naina Lal Kidwai, Shikha Sharma, Swati Piramal, Anu Agha, Swati Piramal, Sulajja Firodia Motwani and Zia Mody have put India on the global firmament.

  Kiran Mazumdar-Shaw

  India, Business Woman, Indian

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• This goodly frame, the earth, seems to me a sterile promontory, this most excellent canopy, the air, look you, this brave o'erhanging firmament, this majestical roof fretted with golden fire, why, it appears no other thing to me than a foul and pestilent congregation of vapours. What a piece of work is a man! how noble in reason! how infinite in faculty! in form and moving how express and admirable! in action how like an angel! in apprehension how like a god! the beauty of the world! the paragon of animals! And yet, to me, what is this quintessence of dust?

  William Shakespeare

  Moving, Angel, Men

  'Hamlet' (1601) act 2, sc. 2, l. [316]

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• We find it hard to picture to ourselves the state of mind of a man of older days who firmly believed that the Earth was the centre of the Universe, and that all the heavenly bodies revolved around it. He could feel beneath his feet the writhings of the damned amid the flames; very likely he had seen with his own eyes and smelt with his own nostrils the sulphurous fumes of Hell escaping from some fissure in the rocks. Looking upwards, he beheld ... the incorruptible firmament, wherein the stars hung like so many lamps.

  Anatole France

  Stars, Eye, Science

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• Describing Starry Night: Firmament and planets both disappeared, but the mighty breath which gives life to all things and in which all is bound up remained.

  Vincent Van Gogh

  Life, Night, Giving

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• I have passed the mountain peak and my soul is soaring in the firmament of Complete and unbounded freedom; I am in comfort, I am in peace.

  Khalil Gibran

  Mountain Peaks, Remembrance, Funeral

  Khalil Gibran (2007). “Kahlil Gibran: Masterpieces”

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• The Cloud Maze. “ An Excursion in Dimension A Climb Though the Firmament; There Is No Beginning There Is No End Enter Where You Please Leave When You Wish Have No Fear of Falling

  Erin Morgenstern

  Fall, Clouds, Wish

  Erin Morgenstern (2016). “The Night Circus”, p.204, Random House

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• The splendors of the firmament of time May be eclipsed, but are extinguished not; Like stars to their appointed height they climb And death is a low mist which cannot blot The brightness it may veil.

  Percy Bysshe Shelley

  Stars, Veils, May

  Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Percy Bysshe Shelley, John Keats (1832). “The Poetical Works of Coleridge, Shelley and Keats: Complete in One Volume”, p.411

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• Belief sloshes around in the firmament like lumps of clay spiralling into a potter's wheel. That's how gods get created, for example. They clearly must be created by their own believers, because a brief resume of the lives of most gods suggests that their origins certainly couldn't be divine. They tend to do exactly the things people would do if only they could, especially when it comes to nymphs, golden showers, and the smiting of your enemies.

  Terry Pratchett

  Nymphs, People, Enemy

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• And new philosophy calls all in doubt, The element of fire is quite put out; The sun is lost, and the earth, and no man's wit Can well direct him where to look for it. And freely men confess that this world's spent, When in the planets, and the firmament They seek so many new; then see that this Is crumbled out again to his atomies. 'Tis all in pieces, all coherence gone; All just supply, and all relation: Prince, subject, Father, Son, are things forgot.

  John Donne

  Father, Philosophy, Son

  John Donne, Henry Alford (1839). “The Works of John Donne, D.D. Dean of Saint Paul's, 1621-1631: With a Memoir of His Life”, p.491

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• Bianca Nazario stands at the end of the world. The firmament above is as blue as the summer skies of her childhood, mirrored in the waters of la caldera; but where the skies she remembers were bounded by mountains, here on Sky there is no horizon, only a line of white cloud.

  David Moles

  Summer, Sky, White

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• If the Word of God is living and powerful, and if the Lord does all things whatsoever he wills; if he said, "Let there be light", and it happened; if he said, "let there be a firmament", and it happened; ...if finally the Word of God himself willingly became man and made flesh for himself out of the most pure and undefiled blood of the holy and ever Virgin, why should he not be capable of making bread his Body and wine and water his Blood?... God said, "This is my Body", and "This is my Blood."

  John of Damascus

  Powerful, Wine, Men

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• So, it comes to pass that, when we pursue an inquiry beyond a certain depth, we step out of the field of psychological categories and enter the sphere of the ultimate mysteries of life. The floorboards of the soul, to which we try to penetrate, fan open and reveal the starry firmament.

  Bruno Schulz

  Soul, Trying, Depth

  Bruno Schulz, Jerzy Ficowski (1990). “Letters and drawings of Bruno Schulz: with selected prose”, Fromm Intl

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• She died that night. Her last breath took her soul, I saw it in my dream. I saw her soul leave her body as she exhaled, and then she had no more needs, no more reason; she was released from her body, and being released, she continued her journey elsewhere, high in the firmament where soul material gathers and plays out all the dreams and joys of which we temporal beings can barely conceive, all the things that are beyond our comprehension, but even so, are not beyond our attainment if we choose to attain them, and believe that we truly can.

  Garth Stein

  Dream, Believe, Night

  Garth Stein (2008). “The Art of Racing in the Rain”, Harper

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• What I saw was just one eye
  In the dawn as I was going:
  A bird can carry all the sky
  In that little button glowing.
  Never in my life I went
  So deep into the firmament.

  Harold Monro

  Eye, Glowing, Sky

  Harold Monro, “The Bird At Dawn”

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• So all night long the storm roared on: The morning broke without a sun; In tiny spherule traced with lines Of Nature’s geometric signs, In starry flake, and pellicle, All day the hoary meteor fell; And, when the second morning shone, We looked upon a world unknown, On nothing we could call our own. Around the glistening wonder bent The blue walls of the firmament, No cloud above, no earth below,— A universe of sky and snow!

  John Greenleaf Whittier

  Morning, Wall, Night

  John Greenleaf Whittier (2012). “Poems of Nature, Poems Subjective and Reminiscent and Religious Poems, Complete Volume II., the Works of Whittier”, p.87, tredition

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• Day was breaking at Plashwater Weir Mill Lock. Stars were yet visible, but there was dull light in the east that was not the light of night. The moon had gone down, and a mist crept along the banks of the river, seen through which the trees were the ghosts of trees, and the water was the ghost of water. This earth looked spectral, and so did the pale stars: while the cold eastern glare, expressionless as to heat or colour, with the eye of the firmament quenched, might have been likened to the stare of the dead.

  Charles Dickens

  Nature, Stars, Eye

  Charles Dickens (1873). “A Cyclopedia of the Best Thoughts of Charles Dickens”, p.317

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