Star Gazing Quotes

• If you want to have a program for moving out into the universe, you have to think in centuries not in decades.

  Freeman Dyson

  Moving, Thinking, Moon

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• The sky is the ultimate art gallery just above us.

  Ralph Waldo Emerson

  Art, Sky, Space

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• For my part I know nothing with any certainty, but the sight of the stars makes me dream.

  Vincent Van Gogh

  Inspirational, Dream, Stars

  Vincent van Gogh, Rachel Barnes (1990). “Van Gogh by Vincent”

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• If people looked at the stars each night, they'd live a lot differently. When you look into infinity, you realize that there are more important things than what people do all day.

  Bill Watterson

  Inspirational, Nature, Stars

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• No sight is more provocative of awe than is the night sky.

  Llewelyn Powys

  Good Night, Sight, Sky

  Llewelyn Powys (1961). “Llewelyn Powys: A Selection from His Writings”

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• If people sat outside and looked at the stars each night, I'll bet they'd live a lot differently.

  Bill Watterson

  Stars, Funny Life, Cute Life

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• Stargazing is one of the most profoundly human things one can do. But perhaps we must more frequently tear ourselves away from the mystery and beauty of the starry heavens above, and rather inspect, admire and foster the moral law within.

  Jack Gleeson

  Beauty, Stars, Law

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• Unknowingly, we plow the dust of stars,
  blown about us by the wind, and drink the
  universe in a glass of rain.

  Ihab Hassan

  Stars, Rain, Glasses

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• 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

  Stars, Philosopher, Stardust

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• The universe is wider than our views of it.

  Henry David Thoreau

  Science, Views, Space

  Henry David Thoreau (2013). “The Essential Thoreau”, p.185, Simon and Schuster

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• Space is the stature of God.

  Joseph Joubert

  God, Space, Stature

  Joseph Joubert (1928). “Pensées and letters of Joseph Joubert”

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• I'm not coming in . . . this is fun.

  Edward Higgins White

  Fun, Moon, Walking

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• Every cubic inch of space is a miracle.

  Walt Whitman

  Space, Miracle, Leaves Of Grass

  Walt Whitman, Sculley Bradley, Harold W. Blodgett (2008). “Leaves of Grass: A Textual Variorum of the Printed Poems, 1855-1856”, p.256, NYU Press

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• How quickly do we grow accustomed to wonders. I am reminded of the Isaac Asimov story Nightfall, about the planet where the stars were visible only once in a thousand years. So awesome was the sight that it drove men mad. We who can see the stars every night glance up casually at the cosmos and then quickly down again, searching for a Dairy Queen.

  Roger Ebert

  Stars, Queens, Night

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• The Universe, so far as we can observe it, is a wonderful and immense engine; its extent, its order, its beauty, its cruelty, makes it alike impressive.

  George Santayana

  Order, Space, Wonderful

  George Santayana, Marianne S. Wokeck, Martin A. Coleman, James Gouinlock (2014). “The Life of Reason Or The Phases of Human Progress: Reason in Religion, Volume VII, Book Three”, p.114, MIT Press

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• Prometheus is reaching out for the stars with an empty grin on his face.

  Arthur Koestler

  Stars, Faces, Empty

  Arthur Koestler (1981). “Kaleidoscope: essays from Drinkers of infinity, and The heel of Achilles and later pieces and stories”, Vintage

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• Since stars appear to be suns, and suns, according to the common opinion, are bodies that serve to enlighten, warm, and sustain a system of planets, we may have an idea of the numberless globes that serve for the habitaton of living creatures.

  William Herschel

  Stars, Moon, Ideas

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• As the skies appear to a man, so is his mind. Some see only clouds there; some, prodigies and portents; some rarely look up at all; their heads, like the brutes,' are directed toward Earth. Some behold there serenity, purity, beauty ineffable. The world runs to see the panorama, when there is a panorama in the sky which few go to see.

  Henry David Thoreau

  Running, Men, Clouds

  Henry David Thoreau, Barry Andrews (2005). “True Harvest: Readings from Henry David Thoreau for Every Day of the Year”, p.29, Unitarian Universalist Association of Congregations

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• The starry heaven, though it occurs so very frequently to our view, never fails to excite an idea of grandeur. This cannot be owing to the stars themselves, separately considered. The number is certainly the cause. The apparent disorder augments the grandeur, for the appearance of care is highly contrary to our ideas of magnificence. Besides, the stars lie in such apparent confusion, as makes it impossible on ordinary occasions to reckon them. This gives them the advantage of a sort of infinity.

  Edmund Burke

  Stars, Lying, Views

  Edmund Burke (1871). “The Works of the Right Honorable Edmund Burke”, p.154

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• I saw for the first time the earth's shape. I could easily see the shores of continents, islands, great rivers, folds of the terrain, large bodies of water. The horizon is dark blue, smoothly turning to black. . . the feelings which filled me I can express with one word-joy.

  Yuri Gagarin

  Airplane, Dark, Islands

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• If humans one day become extinct from a catastrophic collision, there would be no greater tragedy in the history of life in the universe. Not because we lacked the brain power to protect ourselves but because we lacked the foresight. The dominant species that replaces us in post-apocalyptic Earth just might wonder, as they gaze upon our mounted skeletons in their natural history museums, why large headed Homo sapiens fared no better than the proverbially peabrained dinosaurs.

  Neil deGrasse Tyson

  Moon, Skeletons, Museums

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• What struck me most was the silence. It was a great silence, unlike any I have encountered on Earth, so vast and deep that I began to hear my own body: my heart beating, my blood vessels pulsing, even the rustle of my muscles moving over each other seemed audible. There were more stars in the sky than I had expected. The sky was deep black, yet at the same time bright with sunlight.

  Alexey Leonov

  Stars, Moving, Heart

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• First, inevitably, the idea, the fantasy, the fairy tale. Then, scientific calculation. Ultimately, fulfillment crowns the dream.

  Konstantin Tsiolkovsky

  Dream, Ideas, Space

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• This brief century of ours is arguably the most significant one in the history of our universe. We'll have the technology either to self-destruct, or [to] seed our cosmos with life. The situation is so unstable that I doubt we can dwell at this fork in the road for more than another hundred years. But if we end up going the life route instead of the death route, then in a distant future our cosmos will be teaming with life, all of which can be traced back to what we do-here and now. I don't know how we'll be thought of, but I'm sure that we won't be remembered as insignificant.

  Max Tegmark

  Moon, Technology, Self

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• I think it's going to be great if people can buy a ticket to fly up and see black sky and the stars. I'd like to do it myself-but probably after it has flown a serious number of times first!

  Paul Allen

  Stars, Thinking, Sky

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