Firmament Quotes - Page 4

• 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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• My Faith is larger than the Hills— So when the Hills decay— My Faith must take the Purple Wheel To show the Sun the way— 'Tis first He steps upon the Vane— And then — upon the Hill— And then abroad the World He go To do His Golden Will— And if His Yellow feet should miss— The Bird would not arise— The Flowers would slumber on their Stems— No Bells have Paradise— How dare I, therefore, stint a faith On which so vast depends— Lest Firmament should fail for me— The Rivet in the Bands

  Emily Dickinson

  Faith, Flower, Purple

  Emily Dickinson, Cristanne Miller (2016). “Emily Dickinson’s Poems: As She Preserved Them”, p.243, Harvard University Press

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• New constellations of truth are daily discovered in the firmament of knowledge, and new stars are daily shining forth in each constellation.

  Horace Mann

  Stars, Truth, Shining

  Horace Mann (1872). “Thoughts Selected from the Writings of Horace Mann ...”, p.59

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• The Poet's License! 't is the right, Within the rule of duty, To look on all delightful things Throughout the world of beauty. To gaze with rapture at the stars That in the skies are glowing; To see the gems of perfect dye That in the woods are growing, And more than sage astronomer, And more than learned florist, To read the glorious homilies Of Firmament and Forest.

  John Godfrey Saxe

  Stars, Glowing, Sky

  John Godfrey Saxe (1866). “The Masquerade: and other poems”, p.25

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• Just as the line of astronomical thinkers from Copernicus to Newton had destroyed the old astronomy, in which the earth was the center, and the Almighty sitting above the firmament the agent in moving the heavenly bodies about it with his own hands, so now a race of biological thinkers had destroyed the old idea of a Creator minutely contriving and fashioning all animals to suit the needs and purposes of man.

  Andrew Dickson White

  Moving, Animal, Men

  Andrew Dickson White (2012). “A History of the Warfare of Science with Theology in Christendom: From Creation to the Victory of Scientific and Literary Methods”, p.49, Transaction Publishers

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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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• 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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• 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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• Melissa Pritchard's prose, that darkly lyrical firmament, is brightened by the dizzy luminous arrangement of her stars and satellites, her great gifts to us: humor, irony, kindness, brilliance.

  Antonya Nelson

  Stars, Kindness, Dizzy

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• Thus the theory of description matters most.
  It is the theory of the word for those
  For whom the word is the making of the world,
  The buzzing world and lisping firmament.

  Wallace Stevens

  World, Matter, Description

  Wallace Stevens (2011). “The Collected Poems of Wallace Stevens”, p.345, Vintage

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• However much we admire the orator's occasional bursts of eloquence, the noblest written words are commonly as far behind or abovethe fleeting spoken language as the firmament with its stars is behind the clouds.

  Henry David Thoreau

  Stars, Clouds, Fleeting

  Henry David Thoreau (2014). “Citizen Thoreau: Walden, Civil Disobedience, Life Without Principle, Slavery in Massachusetts, A Plea for Captain John Brown”, p.68, Graphic Arts Books

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• Personal beauty is then first charming and itself, when it dissatisfies us with any end; when it becomes a story without an end; when it suggests gleams and visions, and not earthly satisfactions; when it makes the beholder feel his unworthiness; when he cannot feel his right to it, though he were Caesar; he cannot feel more right to it than to the firmament and the splendors of a sunset.

  Ralph Waldo Emerson

  Beauty, Sunset, Vision

  Ralph Waldo Emerson (2000). “Selected Writings of Ralph Waldo Emerson: (A Modern Library E-Book)”, p.242, Modern Library

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• In my utter impotence to test the authenticity of the report of my senses, to know whether the impressions they make on me correspond with outlying objects, what difference does it make, whether Orion is up there in heaven, or some god paints the image in the firmament of the soul?

  Ralph Waldo Emerson

  Knowledge, Differences, Heaven

  Ralph Waldo Emerson, Ronald A. Bosco, Joel Myerson (2015). “Ralph Waldo Emerson”, p.54, Harvard University Press

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• It is a mischievous notion that we are come late into nature; that the world was finished a long time ago. As the world was plastic and fluid in the hands of God, so it is ever to so much of his attributes as we bring to it. To ignorance and sin, it is flint. They adapt to themselves to it as they may; but in proportion as a man has anything in him divine, the firmament flows before him and takes his signet and form.

  Ralph Waldo Emerson

  Ignorance, Knowledge, Men

  Ralph Waldo Emerson (2016). “The American Scholar”, p.15, Library of Alexandria

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• As freely as the firmament embraces the world, so mercy must encircle friend and foe. The sun poursforth impartially his beams through all the regions of infinity; heaven bestows the dew equally on every thirsty plant. Whatever is good and comes from on high is universal and without reserve: but in the heart's recesses darkness dwells.

  Friedrich Schiller

  Heart, Heaven, Darkness

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• I became evil for no reason. I had no motive for my wickedness except wickedness itself. It was foul, and I loved it. I loved the self-destruction, I loved my fall, not the object for which I had fallen but my fall itself. My depraved soul leaped down from your firmament to ruin. I was seeking not to gain anything by shameful means, but shame for its own sake.

  Saint Augustine

  Fall, Mean, Self

  Saint Augustine, Henry Chadwick (2008). “The Confessions”, p.29, Oxford Paperbacks

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• With a clear sky, a bright sun, and a gentle breeze, you will have friends in plenty; but let fortune frown, and the firmament be overcast, and then your friends will prove like the strings of the lute, of which you will tighten ten before you find one that will bear the stretch and keep the pitch.

  Gotthold Ephraim Lessing

  Friendship, Sky, Sun

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• If one might wish for impossibilities, I might then wish that my children might be well versed in physical science, but in due subordination to the fulness and freshness of their knowledge on moral subjects. ... Rather than have it the principal thing in my son's mind, I would gladly have him think that the sun went round the earth, and that the stars were so many spangles set in the bright blue firmament.

  Tom Arnold

  Stars, Children, Science

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• A wise man shall overrule his stars, and have a greater influence upon his own content than all the constellations and planets of the firmament.

  Jeremy Taylor

  Wise, Stars, Men

  Jeremy Taylor (1834). “The Beauties of J. Taylor: Selected from His Works with an Essay on His Life and Writings”, p.362

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• And really, the reason we think of death in celestial terms is that the visible firmament, especially at night (above our blacked-out Paris with the gaunt arches of its Boulevard Exelmans and the ceaseless Alpine gurgle of desolate latrines), is the most adequate and ever-present symbol of that vast silent explosion.

  Vladimir Nabokov

  Death, Night, Thinking

  Vladimir Nabokov (2011). “The Stories of Vladimir Nabokov”, p.561, Vintage

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• What doubt can you have of the Creator when you behold His creation?... Who has decked the heavenly firmament with its stars? Who has clothed the earth in its beauty? How could it be without the creator?

  Leo Tolstoy

  Stars, Doubt, Earth

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• In the great wealth, the great firmament of your nation's generosities this particular choice may perhaps be found by future generations as a trifle eccentric, but the mere fact of it . . . the prodigal, pure, human kindness of it . . . must be seen as a beautiful star in that firmament which shines upon me at this moment, dazzling me a little, but filling me with warmth of the extraordinary elation, the euphoria that happens to so many of us at the first breath of the majestic glow of a new tomorrow.

  Laurence Olivier

  Beautiful, Stars, Kindness

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• I would like to be Jupiter, and lie down in the firmament and make love to everybody.

  Roberto Benigni

  Lying, Making Love, Jupiter

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• By undue profundity we perplex and enfeeble thought; and it is possible to make even Venus herself vanish from the firmament by a scrutiny too sustained, too concentrated, or too direct.

  Edgar Allan Poe

  Venus, Scrutiny, Profundity

  Edgar Allan Poe (2013). “The Works of Edgar Allan Poe”, p.115, Simon and Schuster

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