Quotes about stars
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“I have to dream and reach for the stars, and if I miss a star then I grab a handful of clouds.”

Mike Tyson (1966) American boxer

http://findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_m1077/is_n11_v50/ai_17362107
Miscellaneous

Dreams

“Thence we came forth to rebehold the stars.”

Dante Alighieri book Inferno

Canto XXXIV, line 139 (tr. Longfellow).
The Divine Comedy (c. 1308–1321), Inferno

“If we only have love
Then we'll only be men
And we'll drink from the Grail
To be born once again;
Then with nothing at all
But the little we are
We'll have conquered all time
All space, the sun, and the stars!”

Jacques Brel (1929–1978) Belgian singer-songwriter

If Only We Have Love (1957)
Context: If we only have love
We will never bow down
We'll be tall as the pines
Neither heroes nor clowns.
If we only have love
Then we'll only be men
And we'll drink from the Grail
To be born once again;
Then with nothing at all
But the little we are
We'll have conquered all time
All space, the sun, and the stars!

Love, Men, Drink, Time

“These Great Old Ones, Castro continued, were not composed altogether of flesh and blood. They had shape — for did not this star-fashioned image prove it? — but that shape was not made of matter.”

H.P. Lovecraft (1890–1937) American author

Fiction, The Call of Cthulhu (1926)
Context: There had been aeons when other Things ruled on the earth, and They had had great cities. Remains of Them, he said the deathless Chinamen had told him, were still be found as Cyclopean stones on islands in the Pacific. They all died vast epochs of time before men came, but there were arts which could revive Them when the stars had come round again to the right positions in the cycle of eternity. They had, indeed, come themselves from the stars, and brought Their images with Them.
These Great Old Ones, Castro continued, were not composed altogether of flesh and blood. They had shape — for did not this star-fashioned image prove it? — but that shape was not made of matter. When the stars were right, They could plunge from world to world through the sky; but when the stars were wrong, They could not live. But although They no longer lived, They would never really die...

Fashion

“But now was turning my desire and will,
Even as a wheel that equally is moved,
The Love which moves the sun and the other stars.”

Dante Alighieri book Paradiso

Canto XXXIII, closing lines, as translated by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
The Divine Comedy (c. 1308–1321), Paradiso
Context: As the geometrician, who endeavours
To square the circle, and discovers not,
By taking thought, the principle he wants,Even such was I at that new apparition;
I wished to see how the image to the circle
Conformed itself, and how it there finds place;But my own wings were not enough for this,
Had it not been that then my mind there smote
A flash of lightning, wherein came its wish. Here vigour failed the lofty fantasy:
But now was turning my desire and will,
Even as a wheel that equally is moved, The Love which moves the sun and the other stars.

Love, Sun

“Slowly the joy of flower and bird
Did like a tide withdraw;
And in the heaven a silent star
Smiled on me, infinitely far.”

Francis William Bourdillon (1852–1921) British poet

" The Chantry Of The Cherubim http://www.bartleby.com/236/219.html" in The Oxford Book of English Mystical Verse (1917) by D. H. S. Nicholson. Context: p>I walk as one unclothed of flesh, I wash my spirit clean; I see old miracles afresh, And wonders yet unseen. I will not leave Thee till Thou give Some word whereby my soul may live!I listened — but no voice I heard; I looked — no likeness saw; Slowly the joy of flower and bird Did like a tide withdraw; And in the heaven a silent star Smiled on me, infinitely far.</p

Smile, Flowers, Bird, Joy

“Come, my friends.
'Tis not too late to seek a newer world.
Push off, and sitting well in order smite
The sounding furrows; for my purpose holds
To sail beyond the sunset, and the baths
Of all the western stars, until I die.”

Alfred, Lord Tennyson book Ulysses

Source: Ulysses (1842), l. 54-62
Context: The lights begin to twinkle from the rocks;
The long day wanes; the slow moon climbs; the deep
Moans round with many voices.
Come, my friends.
'Tis not too late to seek a newer world.
Push off, and sitting well in order smite
The sounding furrows; for my purpose holds
To sail beyond the sunset, and the baths
Of all the western stars, until I die.

World

“Be praised, my Lord, through Sister Moon and the stars; in the heavens you have made them, precious and beautiful.”

Francis of Assisi Canticle of the Sun

Canticle of the Sun

Beauty, Sister

“Be different than the world, otherwise, there are lots of stars in the sky.”

Lucky Gupta (1998) Internet celebrity

2020

World

“Look up at the stars and not down at your feet. Try to make sense of what you see, and wonder about what makes the universe exist. Be curious.”

Stephen Hawking (1942–2018) British theoretical physicist, cosmologist, and author

Sense, Universe, Motivational, Funny

“Head of Christ by Morales, exactly as in the description in the pseudo letter of the Roman Proconsul. Morales well entitled to his surname of Divino... [T]he auburn locks seem only prevented from growing over the countenance by the moiety of the star which forms the glory: everything which can even be conceived as necessary to the formation of a face of perfect beauty, but nothing earthly in the appearance. You could not mistake the head for an Apollo or an Adonis. The eyes, beaming with human beauty, are nevertheless bright with the effulgence of celestial light, and fixed upon no particular object. They seem looking on the world. The nose is exquisitely formed, and the flesh tints seem immortal.”

Benjamin Disraeli (1804–1881) British Conservative politician, writer, aristocrat and Prime Minister

Source: Diary entry while in Aix (c. 16 August 1824), quoted in William Flavelle Monypenny and George Earle Buckle, The Life of Benjamin Disraeli, Earl of Beaconsfield. Volume I. 1804–1859 (1929), pp. 52-53

World, Beauty, Light, Appearance

“Our civilization has fallen out of touch with night. With lights, we drive the holiness and beauty of night back to the forests and the sea; the little villages, the crossroads even, will have none of it. Are modern folk, perhaps, afraid of night? Do they fear that vast serenity, the mystery of infinite space, the austerity of stars?”

Henry Beston book Northern Farm

Source: Northern Farm

Fear, Beauty, Light, Sea

“I tell you: one must still have chaos in one, to give birth to a dancing star. I tell you: you have still chaos in you.”

Friedrich Nietzsche book Thus Spoke Zarathustra

Variant: One must still have chaos in oneself to be able to give birth to a dancing star.
Source: Thus Spoke Zarathustra

Birth, Dance

“Not just beautiful, though--the stars are like the trees in the forest, alive and breathing. And they're watching me.”

Haruki Murakami book Kafka on the Shore

Source: Kafka on the Shore (2002), Chapter 15
Context: Now I know exactly how dangerous the forest can be. And I hope I never forget it. Just like Crow said, the world's filled with things I don't know about. All the plants and trees there, for instance. I'd never imagined that trees could be so weird and unearthly. I mean, the only plants I've ever really seen or touched till now are the city kind -neatly trimmed and cared-for bushes and trees. But the ones here -the ones living here -are totally different. They have a physical power, their breath grazing any humans who might chance by, their gaze zeroing in on the intruder like they've spotted their prey. Like they have some dark, prehistoric, magical powers. Like deep-sea creatures rule the ocean depths, in the forest trees reign supreme. If it wanted to, the forest could reject me-or swallow me up whole. A healthy amount of fear and respect might be a good idea.

Beauty, Tree

“If you trust in yourself… and believe in your dreams… and follow your star… you'll still get beaten by people who spent their time working hard and learning things and weren't so lazy.”

Terry Pratchett book The Wee Free Men

Variant: Now... if you trust in yourself... and believe in your dreams... and follow your star... you'll still get beaten by people who spenttime working hard and learning things and weren't so lazy. Goodbye.
Source: The Wee Free Men

People, Dreams, Learning, Time

“But I am constant as the Northern Star,
Of whose true fixed and resting quality
There is no fellow in the firmament.”

William Shakespeare Julius Caesar

Source: Julius Caesar

“I have been loved, Edward told the stars. So? said the stars. What difference does that make when you are all alone now?”

Kate DiCamillo book The Miraculous Journey of Edward Tulane

Source: The Miraculous Journey of Edward Tulane

Love

“Stars hide your fires; let not light see my black and deep desires: The eyes wink at the hand; yet let that be which the eye fears, when it is done, to see”

William Shakespeare Macbeth

Source: Macbeth

Fear, Light

“We are funny creatures. We don't see the stars as they are, so why do we love them? They are not small gold objects, but endless fire.”

Saul Bellow book Henderson the Rain King

Source: Henderson the Rain King

Love

“You are a child of the universe, no less than the trees and the stars. In the noisy confusion of life, keep peace in your soul.”

Max Ehrmann (1872–1945) American writer, poet, and attorney

Variant: Be gentle with yourself.
You are a child of the universe
no less than the trees and the stars;
you have a right to be here.

Life, Peace, Soul, Tree

“Music, of all the arts, stands in a special region, unlit by any star but its own, and utterly without meaning… except its own.”

Leonard Bernstein book The Joy of Music

Source: The Joy of Music

Art, Music

“Not only do we live among the stars, the stars live within us.”

Neil deGrasse Tyson (1958) American astrophysicist and science communicator

Source: Death by Black Hole - And Other Cosmic Quandaries

“Reach high, for stars lie hidden in you. Dream deep, for every dream precedes the goal.”

Rabindranath Tagore (1861–1941) Bengali polymath

Lie, Dreams, Funny

“Women Are Not Roses

Women have no
beginning
only continual
flows.

Though rivers flow
women are not
rivers.

Women are not
roses
they are not oceans
or stars.

i would like to tell
her this but
i think she
already knows.”

Ana Castillo (1953) novelist, poet, essayist, short story writer

Source: Women Are Not Roses

Women, Thinking

“The last ever dolphin message was misinterpreted as a surprisingly sophisticated attempt to do a double-backwards-somersault through a hoop whilst whistling the 'Star Spangled Banner', but in fact the message was this:”

Douglas Adams The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy pentalogy

Source: The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy

“But let me tell you this: sometimes at night, when I look up at the stars, an see the whole sky jus laid out there, don't you think I ain't rememberin it all. I still got dreams like anybody else, an ever so often, I am thinkin about how things might of been. An then, all of a sudden, I'm forty, fifty, sixty years ole, you know?
Well, so what? I may be a idiot, but most of the time, anyway, I tried to do the right thing-- an dreams is jus dreams, ain't they? So whatever else has happened, I am figgerin this: I can always look back an say, at least I ain't led no hum-drum life.
You know what I mean?”

Winston Groom Forrest Gump

Source: Forrest Gump

Life, Dreams, Thinking, Time

“Everything that is dead quivers. Not only the things of poetry, stars, moon, wood, flowers, but even a white trouser button glittering out of a puddle in the street… Everything has a secret soul, which is silent more often than it speaks.”

Wassily Kandinsky (1866–1944) Russian painter

Secret, Soul, Flowers, Dead

“Be practical as well as generous in your ideals. Keep your eyes on the stars, but remember to keep your feet on the ground.”

Theodore Roosevelt (1858–1919) American politician, 26th president of the United States

1900s, Address at the Prize Day Exercises at Groton School (1904)
Context: You need a great many qualities to make a successful man on a nine or an eleven; and just so you need a great many different qualities to make a good citizen. In the first place, of course it is al most tautological to say that to make a good citizen the prime need is to be decent, clean in thought, clean in mind, clean in action; to have an ideal and not to keep that ideal purely for the study to have an ideal which you will in good faith strive to live up to when you are out in life. If you have an ideal only good while you sit at home, an ideal that nobody can live up to in outside life, then I advise you strongly to take that ideal, examine it closely, and then cast it away. It is not a good one. The ideal that it is impossible for a man to strive after in practical life is not the type of ideal that you wish to hold up and follow. Be practical as well as generous in your ideals. Keep your eyes on the stars, but remember to keep your feet on the ground. Be truthful; a lie implies fear, vanity or malevolence; and be frank; furtiveness and insincerity are faults incompatible with true manliness. Be honest, and remember that honesty counts for nothing unless back of it lie courage and efficiency. If in this country we ever have to face a state of things in which on one side stand the men of high ideals who are honest, good, well-meaning, pleasant people, utterly unable to put those ideals into shape in the rough field of practical life, while on the other side are grouped the strong, powerful, efficient men with no ideals: then the end of the Republic will be near. The salvation of the Republic depends the salvation of our whole social system depends upon the production year by year of a sufficient number of citizens who possess high ideals combined with the practical power to realize them in actual life.

“Human speech is like a cracked kettle on which we tap crude rhythms for bears to dance to, while we long to make music that will melt the stars.”

Gustave Flaubert Madame Bovary

Source: Madame Bovary

Music, Dance

“As long as you still experience the stars as something "above you", you lack the eye of knowledge.”

Friedrich Nietzsche (1844–1900) German philosopher, poet, composer, cultural critic, and classical philologist

Knowledge

“The earth is speaking to us, but we can't hear because of all the racket our senses are making. Sometimes we need to erase them, erase our senses. Then - maybe - the earth will touch us. The universe will speak. The stars will whisper.”

Jerry Spinelli book Stargirl

Source: Stargirl

Sense, Universe

“Obstacles cannot crush me. Every obstacle yields to stern resolve. He who is fixed to a star does not change his mind.”

Leonardo Da Vinci (1452–1519) Italian Renaissance polymath

The Notebooks of Leonardo da Vinci (1883), X Studies and Sketches for Pictures and Decorations

Change

“I would rather learn from one bird how to sing than to teach 10,000 stars how not to dance.”

E.E. Cummings (1894–1962) American poet

Collected Poems (1938) New Poems 22
Variant: I'd rather learn from one bird how to sing
than teach ten thousand stars how not to dance.

Bird, Learning, Singing, Dance

“Only the road and the dawn, the sun, the wind, and the rain,
And the watch fire under stars, and sleep, and the road again.”

John Masefield (1878–1967) English poet and writer

Sleep, Sun

“When it is dark enough, you can see the stars.”

Charles A. Beard (1874–1948) American historian

Misattributed
Variant: When its dark enough you can see the stars.

Hope

“This Voyager spacecraft was constructed by the United States of America. We are a community of 240 million human beings among the more than 4 billion who inhabit the planet Earth. We human beings are still divided into nation states, but these states are rapidly becoming a single global civilization.

We cast this message into the cosmos. It is likely to survive a billion years into our future, when our civilization is profoundly altered and the surface of the Earth may be vastly changed. Of the 200 billion stars in the Milky Way galaxy, some--perhaps many--may have inhabited planets and spacefaring civilizations. If one such civilization intercepts Voyager and can understand these recorded contents, here is our message:

This is a present from a small distant world, a token of our sounds, our science, our images, our music, our thoughts, and our feelings. We are attempting to survive our time so we may live into yours. We hope someday, having solved the problems we face, to join a community of galactic civilizations. This record represents our hope and our determination, and our good will in a vast and awesome universe”

Jimmy Carter (1924) American politician, 39th president of the United States (in office from 1977 to 1981)

World, Hope, Music, Way

“Two men looked out from prison bars,
One saw the mud, the other saw stars.”

Dale Carnegie book How to Stop Worrying and Start Living

Source: How to Stop Worrying and Start Living

Men

“Sometimes when I look at you, I feel I'm gazing at a distant star.
It's dazzling, but the light is from tens of thousands of years ago.
Maybe the star doesn't even exist any more. Yet sometimes that light seems more real to me than anything.”

Haruki Murakami book South of the Border, West of the Sun

Source: South of the Border, West of the Sun

Feeling, Light, Distant

“Shoot for the moon, even if you fail, you'll land among the stars”

Cecelia Ahern (1981) Irish novelist

Source: P.S. I Love You

“When the stars were right, They could plunge from world to world through the sky; but when the stars were wrong, They could not live.”

H.P. Lovecraft book The Call of Cthulhu

Source: The Call of Cthulhu

World

“It is late now, I am a bit tired; the sky is irritated by stars. And I love you, I love you, I love you – and perhaps this is how the whole enormous world, shining all over, can be created – out of five vowels and three consonants.”

Vladimir Nabokov (1899–1977) Russian-American novelist, lepidopterist, professor

Source: Letters to Vera

Love, World

“I see you everywhere, in the stars, in the river, to me you're everything that exists; the reality of everything.”

Virginia Woolf book Night and Day

Source: Night and Day

Reality

“because he had no place he could stay in without getting tired of it and because there was nowhere to go but everywhere, keep rolling under the stars…”

Jack Kerouac book On the Road

Source: On the Road

“Ah, not to be cut off,
not through the slightest partition
shut out from the law of the stars.
The inner -- what is it?
if not the intensified sky,
hurled through with birds and deep
with the winds of homecoming.”

Rainer Maria Rilke (1875–1926) Austrian poet and writer

Source: Ahead of All Parting: The Selected Poetry and Prose

Law, Bird

“Gully Foyle is my name
And Terra is my nation.
Deep space is my dwelling place,
The stars my destination.”

Alfred Bester book The Stars My Destination

Source: The Stars My Destination

“I have stretched ropes from steeple to steeple; Garlands from window to window; Golden chains from star to star… And I dance.”

Arthur Rimbaud (1854–1891) French Decadent and Symbolist poet

Source: Complete Works

Dance

“I don't think you will ever fully understand how you've touched my life and made me who I am. I don't think you could ever know just how truly special you are that even on the darkest nights you are my brightest star”

Erica Jong (1942) Novelist, poet, memoirist, critic

Life, Understanding, Thinking, Night

“You must have chaos within you to give birth to a dancing star.”

Friedrich Nietzsche (1844–1900) German philosopher, poet, composer, cultural critic, and classical philologist

Birth, Dance

“They cannot scare me with their empty spaces
Between stars—on stars where no human race is.
I have it in me so much nearer home
To scare myself with my own desert places.”

Robert Frost (1874–1963) American poet

Source: The Poetry of Robert Frost

Home

“A celebrity is any well-known TV or movie star who looks like he spends more than two hours working on his hair.”

Steve Martin (1945) American actor, comedian, musician, author, playwright, and producer

“I need to know that wherever I end up, in the stars or in the gutter, you’re along for the ride.”

Tiffanie DeBartolo (1970) American writer

Source: How to Kill a Rock Star

“I still love you. And sometimes, my friend, the love that I have, and can't give to you, crushes the breath from my chest. Sometimes, even now, my heart is drowning in a sorrow that has no stars without you, and no laughter, and no sleep.”

Gregory David Roberts book Shantaram

Source: Shantaram

Love, Laughter, Sleep, Heart

“I love thee, I love but thee,
With a love that shall not die
Till the sun grows cold,
And the stars are old”

Bayard Taylor (1825–1878) United States poet, novelist and travel writer

"Bedouin Song" (1853), in The Poetical Works of Bayard Taylor (1907), p. 69.
Source: The Poems of Bayard Taylor
Context: I love thee, I love but thee,
With a love that shall not die
Till the sun grows cold,
And the stars are old,
And the leaves of the Judgment Book unfold!
Context: From the Desert I come to thee
On a stallion shod with fire;
And the winds are left behind
In the speed of my desire.
Under thy window I stand,
And the midnight hears my cry:
I love thee, I love but thee,
With a love that shall not die
Till the sun grows cold,
And the stars are old,
And the leaves of the Judgment Book unfold!

Love, Sun

“Once upon a time, in some out of the way corner of that universe which is dispersed into numberless twinkling solar systems, there was a star upon which clever beasts invented knowing.”

Friedrich Nietzsche (1844–1900) German philosopher, poet, composer, cultural critic, and classical philologist

Variant translation: In some remote corner of the universe, poured out and glittering in innumerable solar systems, there once was a star on which clever animals invented knowledge. That was the highest and most mendacious minute of "world history" — yet only a minute. After nature had drawn a few breaths the star grew cold, and the clever animals had to die.
One might invent such a fable and still not have illustrated sufficiently how wretched, how shadowy and flighty, how aimless and arbitrary, the human intellect appears in nature. There have been eternities when it did not exist; and when it is done for again, nothing will have happened.
On Truth and Lie in an Extra-Moral Sense (1873)
Context: Once upon a time, in some out of the way corner of that universe which is dispersed into numberless twinkling solar systems, there was a star upon which clever beasts invented knowing. That was the most arrogant and mendacious minute of "world history," but nevertheless, it was only a minute. After nature had drawn a few breaths, the star cooled and congealed, and the clever beasts had to die. One might invent such a fable, and yet he still would not have adequately illustrated how miserable, how shadowy and transient, how aimless and arbitrary the human intellect looks within nature. There were eternities during which it did not exist. And when it is all over with the human intellect, nothing will have happened.

Way, Universe, Time

“Trust your heart if the seas catch fire, live by love though the stars walk backward.”

E.E. Cummings (1894–1962) American poet

Variant: Trust your heart if the seas catch fire, live by love though the stars walk backwards.

Love, Heart, Sea, Wise

“There was a star danced, and under that was I born.”

William Shakespeare book Much Ado About Nothing

Source: Much Ado About Nothing

Dance