Best Astronomical Quotations and Poetry

This is a collection of astronomical quotations, poems and famous sayings, both ancient and modern times. This page is under a continuous updating process. If you have something to share with us, please submit it here. Your contributions (your own poems and thoughts are welcome too) will be greatly appreciated.
I would like to thank my wife, Shelly, for her wonderful typing skills that were employed in the process of preparing this page.

Longfellow: Evangeline

Silent, one by one,
in the infinite meadows of heavens,
blossomed the lovely stars,
the forget-me-nots of angels.

Longfellow:

Softly the evening came. The sun from the western horizon, like a magician extended his golden wand o'er the landscape.

J. L. McCreery:

There in no death!
the stars go down
To rise upon some other shore,
And bright in Heaven's jeweled crown,
they shine for ever more

D. M. Moir: Dublin University Magazine

Stars are the daisies that begem
The blue fields of the sky.

Adelaide A. Procter: Legend of Provence

No star is ever lost we once
have seen,
We always may be what we
might have been.

Job XXXVIII. 7:

The morning stars sang together,
and all the sons of God shouted for joy.

Emerson: Society and Solitude

Hitch your wagon to a star.

Emerson:

If the stars should appear one night in a thousand years, how would men believe and adore; and preserve for many generations the remembrance of the city of God which had been shown! But every night come out these envoys of beauty, and light the universe with their admonishing smile.

Emerson:

These preachers of beauty, which light the world with their admonishing smile.

Scott: Lay of the Last Minstrel

Her blue eyes sought the west
afar,
For lovers love the western
star.

Shelley: Queen Mab

Its easier to suppose that
the universe has existed from
all eternity than to conceive a
Being beyond its limits capable of creating it.

Omar Khayyam: Rubaiyat

And that inverted Bowl they
call the Sky,
Whereunder crawling coop'd
we live and die,
Lift not you hands to it for help-for it
As impotently moves as you or I.

Ruskin: The Sky

Sometimes gentle, sometimes capricious, sometimes awful,
never the same for two moments together;
almost human in its passions, almost spiritual in its tenderness,
almost Divine in its infinity.

Thomas Cole: Twilight

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

George MacDonald: Songs of Summer

The west is broken into bars
Of orange, gold, and gray,
Gone is the sun, come are the stars,
And night infolds the day.

Byron:

Ye stars, that are the poetry of heaven!

Carlyle:

When I gaze into the stars, they look down upon me with pity from their serene and silent spaces, like eyes glistening with tears over the little lot of man.
Thousands of generations, all as noisy as our own, have been swallowed up by time, and there remains no record of them any more. Yet Arcturus and Orion, Sirius and Pleiades, are still shining in their courses, clear and young, as when the shepard first noted them in the plain of Shinar!

Carlyle:

A star is beautiful; it affords pleasure, not from what it is to do, or to give, but simply by being what it is. It befits the heavens; it has congruity with the mighty space in which it dwells. It has repose; no force disturbs its eternal peace. It has freedom; no obstruction lies between it and infinity.

Wordsworth:

The stars are mansions built by nature's hand, and, haply, there the spirits of the blest dwell, clothed in radiance, their immortal rest.

Coleridge:

The stars hang bright above, silent, as if they watched the sleeping earth.

Campbell:

The sentinel stars set their watch in the sky.

N.P. Willis:

There they stand, the innumerable stars, shining in order like a living hymn, written in light.

Young:

One sun by day; by night ten thousand shine, and light us deep into the deity- How boundless in magnificence and might!- Stars teach us well as shine, and every student of the night inspire; the elder scripture writ by God's own hand, authentic, uncorrupt by man.

Milton:

The evening star, love's harbinger, appeared.

Fuller:

Nature hath appointed the twilight, as a bridge, to pass us out of night into day!

T. Cole:

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

Manilius: Astronomica

Now near the Twins behold Orion rise;
His arms extended measure half the skies:
His stride no less. Onward with steady pace.
He treads the boundless realms of starry space,
On each broad shoulder a bright star display'd,
And three obliquely grace his hanging blade.
In his vast head, immers'd in boundless spheres,
Three stars less bright, but yet as great, he bears;
But farther off removed, their splendour's lost;
Thus grac'd and arm'd, he leads the starry host.
From: Sky Phenomena

Shakespeare: Julius Caesar

When beggars die there are no
comets seen;
The heavens themselves blaze forth the
death of princes.

W. Habington:

One after on the stars have risen and set,
Sparkling upon the hoar-frost of my chain;
The Bear that prowled all night about the fold
Of the North-star hath shrunk into his den,
Scared by the blithesome footsteps of the Dawn.
From: Sky Phenomena

E. Young: Night Thoughts

Devotion! Daughter of Astronomy.
An undevout Astronomer is mad.

W. C. Bryant: Hymn to the North Star

Constellations come, and climb the heavens, and go,
And thou dost see them rise,
Star of the Pole! and thou dost see them set,
Alone, in thy cold skies,
Thou keep'st thy old unmoving station yet.
From: Sky Phenomena

Walt Whitman: When I Heard the Learn'd Atronomer

When I heard the learn'd astronomer,
When the proofs, the figures, were ranged in columns
before me,
When I was shown the charts and diagrams, to add,
divide, and measure them,
When I sitting heard the astronomer where he lectured
with much applause in the lecture-room,
How soon unaccountable I became tired and sick,
Till rising and gliding out I wander'd off by myself,
In the mystical moist night-air, and from time to time,
Looked up in perfect silence at the stars.

N. Armstrong: (21 July, 1969 - while stepping into Mare Tranquilitatis)

That is one small step for man; one giant step for mankind.

A Song by Crowded House:

Seven worlds will collide
whenever I am by your side
and dust from a distant sun
will shower over everyone.
Contributed by Jesus Maiz (Astro-L mailing list)

M. Flanders & D. Swan: At the Drop of a Hat

Jupiter passes Orion
and comes into junction with Mars
Saturn is weaving through infinite space
to its preordained place in the stars

And I gaze at the planets in wonder
at the time and trouble they expend
all to warn me to be careful
in dealings involving a friend.
Contributed by Stephen Goodfellow (Astro-L mailing list)

Kepler:

I measured the skies, now I measure the shadows
Skybound was the mind, the body rests in the earth.

Copyright © 1995 by Marek Dudka

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