“It is time that we steered by the stars, not by the lights of each passing ship.”

— Omar Bradley

Statement (31 May 1948), quoted in An Inconvenient Truth : The Planetary Emergency Of Global Warming And What We Can Do About It (2006) by Al Gore

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Omar Bradley 26

United States Army field commander during World War II 1893–1981

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“We must stop setting our sights by the light of each passing ship; instead we must set our course by the stars.”

George Marshall (1880–1959) US military leader, Army Chief of Staff

Many attribute this quote to Marshall, however, General Omar Bradley is the correct author. Statement by Bradley (31 May 1948), quoted in An Inconvenient Truth : The Planetary Emergency Of Global Warming And What We Can Do About It (2006) by Al Gore.
Misattributed

“If a man who claims to see the future is a fool,
how much more so, the man who believes he can control it?
We think we steer the ship of fate,
but all of us are guided by unseen stars.”

Megan Whalen Turner book Thick as Thieves

Enoclitus (Epigraph)
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“For Rhime the Rudder is of Verses,
With which like Ships they steer their courses.”

Samuel Butler (poet) (1612–1680) poet and satirist

Canto I, line 463
Source: Hudibras, Part I (1663–1664)

“Ships that pass in the night, and speak each other in passing,
Only a signal shown and a distant voice in the darkness;
So on the ocean of life we pass and speak one another,
Only a look and a voice, then darkness again and a silence.”

Henry Wadsworth Longfellow Tales of a Wayside Inn

Pt. III, The Theologian's Tale: Elizabeth, sec. IV.
Source: Tales of a Wayside Inn (1863-1874)

“The clouds, and not the stars, to them
The omen and the sign be given—
The clouds, the vapours of our soil,
Not stars, whose element is heaven.
The deepening shade, the flitting light,
Mark what each coming month will know—
The passing joy, the constant care,
Of life's sad pilgrimage below.”

Letitia Elizabeth Landon (1802–1838) English poet and novelist

The London Literary Gazette, 1833-1835

“This swirl of stars,' Draconus suddenly said, 'marks the plunge of light into darkness. These stars, they are distant suns, shihing their light down upon distant, unknown worlds. Worlds, perhaps, little different from this one. Or vastly different. It hardly matters. Each star swirls its path towards the centre, and at that centre is death - the death of light, the death of time itself.”

Steven Erikson book Forge of Darkness

Forge of Darkness (2013)

“I must down to the sea again, to the lonely sea and the sky,
And all I ask is a tall ship and a star to steer her by,
And the wheel's kick and the wind's song and the white sail's shaking,
And a grey mist on the sea's face, and a grey dawn breaking.”

John Masefield (1878–1967) English poet and writer

The first line is often misquoted as "I must go down to the seas again." and this is the wording used in the song setting by John Ireland. I disagree with this last point. The poet himself was recorded reading this and he definitely says "seas". The first line should read, 'I must down ...' not, 'I must go down ...' The original version of 1902 reads 'I must down to the seas again'. In later versions, the author inserted the word 'go'.

Source: https://poemanalysis.com/sea-fever-john-masefield-poem-analysis/
Salt-Water Ballads (1902), "Sea-Fever"

“How do men act on a sinking ship? Do they hold each other? Do they pass around the whisky? Do they cry?”

Sebastian Junger (1962) American author, journalist and documentarian

Source: The Perfect Storm: A True Story of Men Against the Sea

“Consider an event, for example the outburst if a nova… Suppose this event is observed from two stars in line with the nova, and suppose further that the two stars are moving uniformly with respect to each other in this line. Let the epoch at which these stars passed by each other be taken as the zero of time measurement, and let an observer A on one of the stars estimate the distance and epoch of the nova outburst to be x units of length and t units of time, respectively. Suppose the other star is moving toward the nova with velocity v relative to A.”

Gerald James Whitrow (1912–2000) British mathematician

Let an observer B on the star estimate the distance and epoch of the nova outburst to be x<nowiki>'</nowiki> units of length and t<nowiki>'</nowiki> units of time, respectively. Then the Lorentz formulae, relating x<nowiki>'</nowiki> to t<nowiki>'</nowiki>, are<center><math>x' = \frac {x-vt}{\sqrt{1-\frac{v^2}{c^2}}} ; \qquad t' = \frac {t-\frac{vx}{c^2}}{\sqrt{1-\frac{v^2}{c^2}}}</math></center>
These formulae are... quite general, applying to any event in line with two uniformly moving observers. If we let c become infinite then the ratio of v to c tends to zero and the formulae become<center><math>x' = x - vt ; \qquad t' = t</math></center>.
The Structure of the Universe: An Introduction to Cosmology (1949)

“As we approached each other, the noise and the students around us melted away and we were utterly alone, passing, smiling, holding each other's eyes, floors and walls gone, two people in a universe of space and stars.”

Jerry Spinelli (1941) American children's writer

“It is time that we steered by the stars, not by the lights of each passing ship.”

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