
“The man in the street does not know a star in the sky.”
1840s, Essays: First Series (1841), Self-Reliance
“The man in the street does not know a star in the sky.”
1840s, Essays: First Series (1841), Self-Reliance
“By association with nature's enormities, a man's heart may truly grow big also.”
Source: The Importance of Living (1937), p. 282
Context: By association with nature's enormities, a man's heart may truly grow big also. There is a way of looking upon a landscape as a moving picture and being satisfied with nothing less big as a moving picture, a way of looking upon tropic clouds over the horizon as the backdrop of a stage and being satisfied with nothing less big as a backdrop, a way of looking upon the mountain forests as a private garden and being satisfied with nothing less as a private garden, a way of listening to the roaring waves as a concert and being satisfied with nothing less as a concert, and a way of looking upon the mountain breeze as an air-cooling system and being satisfied with nothing less as an air-cooling system. So do we become big, even as the earth and firmaments are big. Like the "Big Man" described by Yuan Tsi (A. D. 210-263), one of China's first romanticists, we "live in heaven and earth as our house."
"The Larger College".
In Classic Shades, and Other Poems (1890)
Context: p>Man's books are but man's alphabet,
Beyond and on his lessons lie — The lessons of the violet,
The large gold letters of the sky; The love of beauty, blossomed soil, The large content, the tranquil toil:The toil that nature ever taught,
The patient toil, the constant stir,
The toil of seas where shores are wrought,
The toil of Christ, the carpenter;
The toil of God incessantly
By palm-set land or frozen sea.</p
Time in History: Views of Time from Prehistory to the Present Day (1988), p.22
“We all love conflagrations. When the sky changes color, it is a dead man's passing.”
Source: The Magnetic Fields
“Man is the nobler growth our realms supply,
And souls are ripened in our northern sky.”
The Invitation.
Bartlett's Familiar Quotations, 10th ed. (1919)
w:Dorothy Norman recorded a conversation between Stieglitz and a man, looking at one of his 'Equivalents' prints
Source: 'Minor White, A Living Remembrance', Dorothy Norman, in 'Aperture', 1984, p. 9.
“How many times must a man look up before he can see the sky?”
Song lyrics, The Freewheelin' Bob Dylan (1963), Blowin' in the Wind
"To Shakespeare"
Poems (1851)
Context: The soul of man is larger than the sky,
Deeper than ocean, or the abysmal dark
Of the unfathomed center. Like that ark,
Which in its sacred hold uplifted high,
O'er the drowned hills, the human family,
And stock reserved of every living kind,
So, in the compass of the single mind,
The seeds and pregnant forms in essence lie,
That make all worlds. Great poet, 'twas thy art
To know thyself, and in thyself to be
Whate'er Love, Hate, Ambition, Destiny,
Or the firm, fatal purpose of the Heart
Can make of Man. Yet thou wert still the same,
Serene of thought, unhurt by thy own flame.