“These were everyday sounds magnified by darkness. And darkness was nothing - it was not a substance, it was not a presence, it was no more than an absence of light.”

“Darkness is absence of light. Shadow is diminution of light.”

Leonardo Da Vinci (1452–1519) Italian Renaissance polymath

“If consciousness is, as some inhuman thinker has said, nothing more than a flash of light between two eternities of darkness, then there is nothing more execrable than existence.”

Miguel de Unamuno (1864–1936) 19th-20th century Spanish writer and philosopher

“In the presence of total Darkness, the mind finds it absolutely necessary to create light.”

Isaac Asimov (1920–1992) American writer and professor of biochemistry at Boston University, known for his works of science fiction …

“There is nothing in the dark that isn't there when the lights are on.”

Rod Serling (1924–1975) American screenwriter

“The conditions at IISc were no match to the American centres but it is better to light a candle than curse the darkness.”

C. N. R. Rao (1934) Indian chemist

“Without darkness, nothing comes to birth, As without light, nothing flowers.”

May Sarton (1912–1995) American poet, novelist, and memoirist

“So you can try and live in darkness
but you will never shake the light.
It will greet you every morning and make you more aware with its absence at night”

Conor Oberst (1980) American musician

“But sanity, Vasko decided, was like the pattern of lights he could see through his cabin window. In almost any direction the only way to travel was into darkness, and there was a lot more darkness than light.”

Alastair Reynolds book Absolution Gap

“He who never looks up to a living God, to a heavenly presence, loses the power of perceiving that presence, and the universe slowly turns into a dead machine, clashing and grinding on, without purpose or end. If the light within us be darkness, how great is that darkness!”

James Freeman Clarke (1810–1888) American theologian and writer