“His everyday conscious self is only a small part of the mind, like the final crescent of the moon. In moments of crisis, the full moon suddenly appears.”

— Colin Wilson

Source: Poetry and Mysticism (1969), p. 156
Context: These are the visionary, mystical moments, when a man 'completes his partial mind'. His everyday conscious self is only a small part of the mind, like the final crescent of the moon. In moments of crisis, the full moon suddenly appears.

Adopted from Wikiquote. Last update June 3, 2021. History

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Colin Wilson192

author 1931–2013

Jack T. Chick (1924–2016) Christian comics writer

Chick tracts, " Allah Had No Son http://www.chick.com/reading/tracts/0042/0042_01.asp" (1994)

“Perhaps the crescent moon smiles in doubt
at being told that it is a fragment
awaiting perfection.”

Rabindranath Tagore (1861–1941) Bengali polymath

Source: Fireflies: A Collection of Proverbs, Aphorisms and Maxims

“Once, my back wedded to the solid cliff,
I sat silently, bathed in the full moon's light. I counted there ten thousand shapes,
None with substance save the moon's own glow. The pristine mind is empty as the moon,
I thought, and like the moon, freely shines. By what I knew of moon I knew the mind,
Each mirror to each, profound as stone.”

Han-shan Chinese monk and poet

Encounters With Cold Mountain, tr. Peter Stambler (Foreign Languages Press, Beijing, 1996)

“A weak mind sinks under prosperity, as well as under adversity. A strong and deep mind has two highest tides – when the moon is at the full, and when there is no moon.”

David Hare (1947) British writer

Augustus William Hare and Julius Charles Hare Guesses at Truth (London: Macmillan, ([1827-48] 1867) pp. 209-10.
Misattributed

“I wish to cry. Yet, I laugh, and my lipstick leaves a red stain like a bloody crescent moon on the top of the beer can.”

Sylvia Plath (1932–1963) American poet, novelist and short story writer

Source: The Unabridged Journals of Sylvia Plath

“There's something in a flying horse,
There's something in a huge balloon;
But through the clouds I'll never float
Until I have a little Boat,
Shaped like the crescent-moon.”

William Wordsworth Peter Bell

Prologue, stanza 1.
Peter Bell (1798)

“[Hypotheses]
1. That the Moon receives its light from the sun.
2. That the earth is in the relation of a point and centre to the sphere in which the moon moves.
3. That, when the moon appears to us halved, the great circle which divides the dark and the bright portions of the moon is in the direction of our eye.
4. That, when the moon appears to us halved, its distance from the sun is then less than a quadrant by one-thirtieth of a quadrant.
5. That the breadth of the (earth's) shadow is (that) of two moons.
6. That the moon subtends one fifteenth part of a sign of the zodiac.”

Aristarchus of Samos ancient Greek astronomer and mathematician

Note "is less than a quadrant..." is less than 90° by l/30th of 90° or 3°, and is therefore equal to 87°.
On the Sizes and Distances of the Sun and the Moon (c. 250 BC)

“The desert sands look white as snow;
The crescent moon hangs like a bow.
When would the steed in golden gear
Gallop all night through autumn clear?”

Li He (790–816) Chinese writer

"Twenty-three Horse Poems", 5 (《马诗二十三首（其五）》), in Song of the Immortals: An Anthology of Classical Chinese Poetry, trans. Xu Yuanchong (Penguin Books, 1994), p. 91
Original: (zh-CN) 大漠沙如雪，燕山月似钩。
何当金络脑，快走踏清秋。

“If all women were like as the one we have lost,
Then women would be preferred to men.
For the feminine gender is no shame for the sun,
Nor is the masculine gender an honor for the crescent moon”

Al-Mutanabbi (915–965) Arabic poet from the Abbasid era

“The moon, appearing every month in several phases, is symbolic of the Jewish people whose history has assumed a variety of phases. Like the moon, they reappear aftern being eclipsed.”

Philip Birnbaum (1904–1988) American translator and writer

Daily Prayer Book (1949) p.562

“His everyday conscious self is only a small part of the mind, like the final crescent of the moon. In moments of crisis, the full moon suddenly appears.”

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