Edmond Halley Quotes

If I could put my hand on the north star, would it be as beautiful? The sea is lovely, but when we bathe in it the beauty forsakesall the near water. For the imagination and senses cannot be gratified at the same time.

A Hubble Space Telescope photograph of the universe evokes far more awe for creation than light streaming through a stained glass window in a cathedral.

I've read that a naked eye can see six thousand stars in the hundred billion galaxies, but I couldn't believe it, what with the sky white with starlight. I saw a million stars with one eye and two million with both.

Praised be You, my Lord, through Sister Moon and the stars; in the heavens, you have made them bright, precious and fair.

It is a strange thing how little in general people know about the sky. It is the part of creation in which nature has done more for the sake of pleasing man.

It has always irked me as improper that there are still so many people for whom the sky is no more than a mass of random points of light. I do not see why we should recognize a house, a tree, or a flower here below and not, for example, the red Arcturus up there in the heavens as it hangs from its constellation Bootes, like a basket hanging from a balloon.

Look at the stars! Look, look up at the skies! Oh look at all the fire-folk sitting in the air! The bright boroughs, the circle-citadels there!

... and we shall find A pleasure in the dimness of the stars.

The evening star Is the most beautiful of all stars

From the rocket we can see the huge sphere of the planet in one or another phase of the Moon. We can see how the sphere rotates, and how within a few hours it shows all its sides successively ... and we shall observe various points on the surface of the Earth for several minutes and from different sides very closely. This picture is so majestic, attractive and infinitely varied that I wish with all my soul that you and I could see it.

Have you noticed that the astronomers and mathematicians are much the most cheerful people of the lot? I suppose that perpetually contemplating things on so vast a scale makes them feel either that it doesn't matter a hoot anyway, or that anything so large and elaborate must have some sense in it somewhere.

I am the blue-lidded daughter of Sunset; I am the naked brilliance of the voluptuous night-sky.

A curtain of stars, miles of them, are scattered, glowing, across the sky and their multitude humbles me, which I have a hard time tolerating. She shrugs and nods after I say something about forms of anxiety. It's as if her mind is having a hard time communicating with her mouth, as if she is searching for a rational analysis of who I am, which is, of course, an impossibility: there... is... no... key.

Then stars arise, and the night is holy.

You do not have to sit outside in the dark. If, however, you want to look at the stars, you will find that darkness is necessary. But the stars neither require nor demand it.

From space, astronauts can see people making love as a tiny speck of light. Not light, exactly, but a glow that could be confused for light - a coital radiance that takes generations to pour like honey through the darkness to the astronaut's eyes. In about one and a half centuries - after the lovers who made the glow will have long since been laid permanently on their backs - the metropolitan cities will be seen from space. They will glow all year. Smaller cities will also be seen, but with great difficulty. Towns will be virtually impossible to spot. Individual couples invisible.

Saturn is the most photogenic planet in the solar system.

We fail in even the simplest of all scientific observations-nobody looks up anymore.

Starlight and comet tails burned the tips of endless grass below into hammered silver. Like thousands of tapers in the chapel, just blown out but still glowing. If one could drown in the grass...it might be the best way to die.

What can be more soul shaking than peering through a 100-inch telescope at a distant galaxy, holding a 100-million-year-old fossil or a 500,000-year-old stone tool in one's hand, standing before the immense chasm of space and time that is the Grand Canyon, or listening to a scientist who gazed upon the face of the universe's creation and did not blink?

The Sun, the stars and the seasons as they pass, some can gaze upon these with no strain of fear.

When we can build something like the Hubble telescope and fathom images of this vast cosmos of which we are a part, it really gives pause to wonder what and who we are within a larger framework than linear adventures at the shopping mall and taxes.

The night is shattered, and the blue stars shiver in the distance.

[...] the awesome splendor of the universe is much easier to deal with if you think of it as a series of small chunks.