Celestial Magnificence Quotes

Through our eyes, the universe is perceiving itself. Through our ears, the universe is listening to its harmonies. We are the witnesses through which the universe becomes conscious of its glory, of its magnificence.

When we contemplate the whole globe as one great dewdrop, striped and dotted with continents and islands, flying through space with other stars all singing and shining together as one, the whole universe appears as an infinite storm of beauty.

To most people, I fancy, the stars are beautiful; but if you asked why, they would be at a loss to reply, until they remembered what they had heard about astronomy, and the great size and distance and possible habitation of those orbs. ... [We] persuade ourselves that the power of the starry heavens lies in the suggestion of astronomical facts.

Life is not mean, it is grand; if it is mean to any, he or she makes it so. God made it glorious. It is paved with diamonds; its banks he fringed with flowers. He overarched it with stars. Around it He spread the glory of the physical universe-suns, moon, worlds, constellations, systems-all that is magnificent in motion, sublime in magnitude, and grand in order and obedience. God would not have attended life with this broad march of grandeur if it did not mean something.

I've never seen a moon in the sky that, if it didn't take my breath away, at least misplaced it for a moment.

Yeah we all shine on, like the moon, and the stars, and the sun.

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

I have long thought that anyone who does not regularly - or ever - gaze up and see the wonder and glory of a dark night sky filled with countless stars loses a sense of their fundamental connectedness to the universe.

In winter, the stars seem to have rekindled their fires, the moon achieves a fuller triumph, and the heavens wear a look of a more exalted simplicity. Summer is more wooing and seductive, more versatile and human, appeals to the affections and the sentiments, and fosters inquiry and the art impulse.

There are few things that have filled me with such breathless awe as flying in the black of night across oceans and continents and looking out my cockpit window upon the infinite glory of millions of stars.

This sight... is by far the noblest astronomy affords.

Call for the grandest of all earthly spectacles, what is that? It is the sun going to his rest.

How lovely are the portals of the night, when stars come out to watch the daylight die.

The mystery of the evening-star brilliant in silence and distance between the downward-surging plunge of the sun and the vast, hollow seething of inpouring night. The magnificence of the watchful morning-star, that watches between the night and the day, the gleaming clue to the two opposites.