Quotes about sky (1495 quotes, page 12)

“I am most anxious to get into my London painting-room, for I do not consider myself at work unless I am before a six-foot canvas. I have done a good deal of skying for I am determined to conquer all difficulties, and that among the rest.”

John Constable (1776–1837) English Romantic painter

Quote from John Constable's letter to Rev. John Fisher (23 October 1821), as quoted in Richard Friedenthal, Letters of the great artists – from Blake to Pollock (Thames and Hudson, London, 1963), p. 41
1820s

Painting

“A city is where you can sign a petition, boo the chief justice, fish off a pier, gaze at a hippopotamus, buy a flower at the corner, or get a good hamburger or a bad girl at 4 a. m. A city is where sirens make white streaks of sound in the sky and foghorns speak in dark grays. San Francisco is such a city.”

Herb Caen (1916–1997) American newspaper columnist

Caen, Herb. "A city is like San Francisco, not a faceless 'burb" http://www.sfgate.com/entertainment/article/A-city-is-like-San-Francisco-not-a-faceless-burb-3168435.php S.F. Gate, 2010.
Attributed

Justice , Girl , Flowers , Fish

“In the black sky no star is seen,
somewhere in ambush lurks the Angel of Death,
but the spices tongues of the masqueraders
are loose and shameless
A shout:
"Make way for the hero!"
Ah yes. Displacing the tall one,
he will step forth now without fail
and sing to us about holy vengeance…”

Anna Akhmatova (1889–1966) Russian modernist poet

Poem without a Hero (1963)

Death , Angels , Way , Star

“The male sense of space must differ from that of the female, who has such interesting, active, and significant inner space. The space that interests men is outer. The fly ball high against the sky, the long pass spiraling overhead, the jet fighter like a scarcely visible pinpoint nozzle laying down its vapor trail at 40,000 feet, the gazelle haunch flickering just beyond arrow-reach, the uncountable stars sprinkled on their great black wheel, the horizon, the mountaintop, the quasar — these bring portents with them and awaken a sense of relation with the invisible, with the empty. The ideal male body is taut with lines of potential force, a diagram extending outward; the ideal female body curves around centers of repose.”

John Updike (1932–2009) American novelist, poet, short story writer, art critic, and literary critic

“The Disposable Rocket,” Michigan Quarterly Review (Fall 1993)

Men , Star , Sense , Flying

“Rain is grace; rain is the sky condescending to the earth; without rain, there would be no life.”

John Updike (1932–2009) American novelist, poet, short story writer, art critic, and literary critic

Source: Self-Consciousness : Memoirs (1989), Ch. 1

Life

“Even peasants wholly without knowledge of the quarters of the sky believe that oxen ought to face only in the direction of the sunrise.”

Vitruvius book De architectura

Source: De architectura (The Ten Books On Architecture) (~ 15BC), Book VI, Chapter VI, Sec. 1

Knowledge

“All I have is a voice
To undo the folded lie,
The romantic lie in the brain
Of the sensual man-in-the-street
And the lie of Authority
Whose buildings grope the sky:
There is no such thing as the State
And no one exists alone;
Hunger allows no choice
To the citizen or the police;
We must love one another or die.”

W. H. Auden September 1, 1939

Source: September 1, 1939 (1939), Lines 78–88; for a 1955 anthology text the poet changed this line to "We must love one another and die" to avoid what he regarded as a falsehood in the original.

Love , Hunger , Lie

“I gave to you, now, you give to me
I'd like to know what you learned.
The sky is blue and so is the sea
What is the color, when black is burned?”

Neil Young (1945) Canadian singer-songwriter

I Am a Child, from Last Time Around (1968)
Song lyrics, With Buffalo Springfield

Color , Learning , Sea

“I loved you, so I drew these tides of men into my hands
and wrote my will across the sky in stars
To gain you Freedom, the seven-pillared worthy house,
that your eyes might be shining for me
When I came.”

T. E. Lawrence book Seven Pillars of Wisdom

Dedicatory poem, to "S. A.", as written in the 1922 "Oxford text"; variant : "When we came" for "When I came" in the 1926 edition, and others.
Seven Pillars of Wisdom (1922)

Love , Men , Star , Freedom

“All the wild world is beautiful, and it matters but little where we go, to highlands or lowlands, woods or plains, on the sea or land or down among the crystals of waves or high in a balloon in the sky; through all the climates, hot or cold, storms and calms, everywhere and always we are in God's eternal beauty and love. So universally true is this, the spot where we chance to be always seems the best.”

John Muir (1838–1914) Scottish-born American naturalist and author

June 1890, page 299
John of the Mountains, 1938

Love , God , World , Beauty

“I read his awful name, emblazon'd high
With golden letters on th' illumin'd sky.”

Anna Laetitia Barbauld (1743–1825) English author

Poems (1773), "An Address to the Deity", p. 128.

Reading

“On the battlefield called Vigrid, the gods will fall in battle with the frost giants, and the frost giants will fall in battle with the gods. The undead troops from Hel will litter the ground in their final deaths, and the noble Einherjar will lie beside them on the frozen ground, all of the them dead for the last time, beneath the lifeless misty sky, never to rise again, never to wake and fight.”

Neil Gaiman (1960) English fantasy writer

Source: Norse Mythology (2017), Chapter 16, “Ragnarok: The Final Destiny of the Gods” (p. 276)

Death , God , Lie , Time

“The summer was heavy with a kind of soft grey-blue weight in the sky—yet not in the sky, for it was as though there were no sky, but only air, an impalpable grey-blue substance, drugged with the weight of its own heat and hue.”

Mervyn Peake book Titus Groan

Source: Titus Groan (1946), Chapter 60 “In Preparation for Violence” (p. 323)

Summer

“Involved in my own entrails and a crust
Turning a pitted surface towards a space,
I am a world that watches through a sky
And is persuaded by mirrors
To regard its being as an external shell,
One of a universe of stars and faces.”

Stephen Spender (1909–1995) English poet and man of letters

"The Mask"
The Still Centre (1939)

World , Star , Universe

“These, in the day when heaven was falling,
The hour when earth’s foundations fled,
Followed their mercenary calling
And took their wages and are dead.

Their shoulders held the sky suspended;
They stood, and earth’s foundations stay;
What God abandoned, these defended,
And saved the sum of things for pay.”

A.E. Housman (1859–1936) English classical scholar and poet

No. 37 ("Epitaph on an Army of Mercenaries").
Last Poems http://www.gutenberg.org/dirs/etext05/8lspm10.txt (1922)

God , Dead

“Never day-beam hath shone o'er
Lovelier or wilder shore!
Half was land, and half was sea
Where the eye could only see
The blue sky for boundary.”

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

(30th November 1822) Fragments in Rhyme V: the Happy Isle
7th December 1822) Fragments in Rhyme VI: The Painter's Love see The Improvisatrice (1824
14th December 1822) Fragments in Rhyme VII: Manmadin, The Indian Cupid. Floating down the Ganges see The Improvisatrice (1824
21st December 1822) Fragments in Rhyme IX: The Female Convict see The Improvisatrice (1824
The London Literary Gazette, 1821-1822

Sea

“Earth loves the rain, the proud sky loves to give it. The whole world loves to create futurity. I say then to the world, "I share your love." Is this not the source of the phrase, "This loves to happen"?”

Marcus Aurelius book Meditations

The last phrase is quoted in J. D. Salinger's Franny and Zooey as "It loved to happen".
Meditations (c. 121–180 AD), Book X, 21
Original: (el) ῾Ἐρᾷ μὲν ὄμβρου γαῖα, ἐρᾷ δὲ ὁ σεμνὸς αἰθήρ,᾿ ἐρᾷ δὲ ὁ κόσμος ποιῆσαι ὃ ἂν μέλλῃ γίνεσθαι. λέγω οὖν τῷ κόσμῳ ὅτι σοὶ συνερῶ. μήτι δὲ οὕτω κἀκεῖνο λέγεται, ὅτι: φιλεῖ τοῦτο γίνεσθαι;

Love , World , Future

“One rainy day in Cologne on the Rhine, the catalogue of a teaching aids company caught my attention. It was illustrated with models of all kind – mathematical, geometrical, anthropological, zoological, botanical, anatomical, mineralogical, paleontological, and so forth- elements of of such a diverse nature that the absurdity of the collection confused the eye and mind, producing hallucinations and lending the objects depicted new and rapidly changing meanings. I suddenly felt my 'visionary faculties' so intensified that I began seeing the newly emerged objects against a new background. To capture it, a little paint or a few lines were enough, a horizon, a sky, a wooden floor, that sort of things. My hallucination had been fixed. Now it was a matter of interpreting the hallucination in a few words or sentences Such as: 'Above the clouds midnight passes. Above midnight glides the invisible bird of day..”

Max Ernst (1891–1976) German painter, sculptor and graphic artist

Quote in 'Biographical Notes. Tissue of truth, Tissue of Lies', 1929; as cited in Max Ernst. A Retrospective, Munich, Prestel, 1991, p. 290
1910 - 1935

Mathematics , Nature , Bird , Change

“For the man sound in body and serene of mind there is no such thing as bad weather; every sky has its beauty, and storms which whip the blood do but make it pulse more vigorously.”

George Gissing book The Private Papers of Henry Ryecroft

Winter § I, p. 213
The Private Papers of Henry Ryecroft (1903)

Beauty , Weather

“"What's this? Am I falling? My legs are giving way under me," he thought, and fell on his back. He opened his eyes, hoping to see how the struggle of the French soldiers with the artilleryman was ending, and eager to know whether the red-haired gunner artilleryman was killed or not, whether the cannons had been taken or saved. But he saw nothing of all that. Above him there was nothing but the sky — the lofty sky, not clear, but still immeasurably lofty, with gray clouds creeping quietly over it.”

Leo Tolstoy book War and Peace

Bk. III, ch. 16
War and Peace (1865–1867; 1869)

Hope , Way

“The Lord descended from above
And bow’d the heavens high;
And underneath his feet he cast
The darkness of the sky.

On cherubs and on cherubims
Full royally he rode;
And on the wings of all the winds
Came flying all abroad.”

Thomas Sternhold (1500–1549) British writer

A Metrical Version of Psalm 104, reported in Bartlett's Familiar Quotations, 10th ed. (1919).

Flying

“Sometimes girls write me. One girl in Yugoslavia sent me a whole slew of love letters. I don't know how she got my address. She was in a crowd watching me play. She says when I left there the stars fell out of the sky over Yugoslavia, or something like that.”

Bobby Fischer (1943–2008) American chess prodigy, chess player, and chess writer

1960s, Portrait of a Genius As a Young Chess Master (1961)

Love , Girl , Star

“And as he lay there a far crack of lightning went bluely down the sky and bequeathed him in an embryonic bird's first fissured vision of the world and transpiring instant and outrageous from dark to dark a final view of the grotto and the shapeless white plasm struggling upon the rich and incunabular moss like a lank swamp hare.”

Cormac McCarthy book Outer Dark

Outer Dark (1968)

World , Bird

“Our bugles sang truce, for the night-cloud had lower'd,
And the sentinel stars set their watch in the sky;
And thousands had sunk on the ground overpower'd,
The weary to sleep, and the wounded to die.”

Thomas Campbell (1777–1844) British writer

The Soldier's Dream http://www.bartleby.com/106/267.html

Star , Sleep , Night

“His cold remains all naked to the sky,
On distant shores unwept, unburied lie.”

Homér The Odyssey (Cowper)

XI. 72–73 (tr. Alexander Pope); of Elpenor.
Odyssey (c. 725 BC)

Lie , Distant

“"Very well," said Cugel. "I will ride with you to Taun Tassel, but you must accept these three terces in full, exact, final, comprehensive and complete compensation for the ride and every other aspect, adjunct, by-product and consequence, either direct or indirect, of the said ride, renouncing every other claim, now, and forever, including all times of the past and future, without exception, and absolving me, in part and in whole, from any and all further obligation."
Iucounu held up small balled fists and gritted his teeth toward the sky. "I repudiate your entire paltry philosophy! I find zest in giving!"”

Jack Vance Dying Earth

Source: Dying Earth (1950-1984), Cugel's Saga (1983), Chapter 6, section 2, "Spatterlight"

Time , Past , Future , Parting

“Overhead the hollow stretch of whitish cloud shutting out the sky was as a tent which had the whole heath for its floor.”

Thomas Hardy book The Return of the Native

Bk. I, ch. 1
The Return of the Native (1878)

“Nature is always lovely, invincible, glad, whatever is done and suffered by her creatures. All scars she heals, whether in rocks or water or sky or hearts.”

John Muir (1838–1914) Scottish-born American naturalist and author

24 March 1895, page 337
John of the Mountains, 1938

Love , Nature , Suffering , Water

“I believe in you and me. I'm like Albert Schweitzer and Bertrand Russell and Albert Einstein in that I have a respect for life – in any form. I believe in nature, in the birds, the sea, the sky, in everything I can see or that there is real evidence for. If these things are what you mean by God, then I believe in God. But I don't believe in a personal God to whom I look for comfort or for a natural on the next roll of the dice.”

Frank Sinatra (1915–1998) American singer and film actor

Playboy interview (1963)

Life , God , Nature , Bird

“Well may storm be on the sky,
And the waters roll on high,
When MANMADIN passes by.
Earth below and heaven above
Well may bend to thee, oh Love!”

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

Manmadin, The Indian Cupid. Floating down the Ganges from The London Literary Gazette (14th December 1822) Fragments in Rhyme VII
The Improvisatrice (1824)

Love , Water

“A cup of wine, under the flowering trees;
I drink alone, for no friend is near.
Raising my cup I beckon the bright moon,
For he, with my shadow, will make three men.
The moon, alas, is no drinker of wine;
Listless, my shadow creeps about at my side.
Yet with the moon as friend and the shadow as slave
I must make merry before the Spring is spent.
To the songs I sing the moon flickers her beams;
In the dance I weave my shadow tangles and breaks.
While we were sober, three shared the fun;
Now we are drunk, each goes his way.
May we long share our odd, inanimate feast,
And meet at last on the Cloudy River of the sky.”

Li Bai (701–762) Chinese poet of the Tang dynasty poetry period

"Drinking Alone by Moonlight" (月下獨酌), one of Li Bai's best-known poems, as translated by Arthur Waley in More Translations From the Chinese (1919)
Variant translation:
From a pot of wine among the flowers
I drank alone. There was no one with me—
Till, raising my cup, I asked the bright moon
To bring me my shadow and make us three.
Alas, the moon was unable to drink
And my shadow tagged me vacantly;
But still for a while I had these friends
To cheer me through the end of spring...
I sang. The moon encouraged me.
I danced. My shadow tumbled after.
As long as I knew, we were boon companions.
And then I was drunk, and we lost one another.
...Shall goodwill ever be secure?
I watch the long road of the River of Stars.
"Drinking Alone with the Moon" (trans. Witter Bynner and Kiang Kang-hu)

Men , Way , Spring , Flowers

“I picked up a newspaper today and I couldn't believe it. I read eight headlines that talked about chaos, violence, unrest. And it just was Henny Penny -- "The sky is falling." I've never seen anything like it! And here is a country that's being liberated, here are people who are going from being repressed and held under the thumb of a vicious dictator, and they're free. And all this newspaper could do, with eight or 10 headlines, they showed a man bleeding, a civilian, who they claimed we had shot —one thing after another.
From the very beginning, we were convinced that we would succeed, and that means that that regime would end. And we were convinced that as we went from the end of that regime to something other than that regime, there would be a period of transition. And, you cannot do everything instantaneously; it's never been done, everything instantaneously. We did, however, recognize that there was at least a chance of catastrophic success, if you will, to reverse the phrase, that you could in a given place or places have a victory that occurred well before reasonable people might have expected it, and that we needed to be ready for that; we needed to be ready with medicine, with food, with water. And, we have been.
Freedom's untidy, and free people are free to make mistakes and commit crimes and do bad things. They're also free to live their lives and do wonderful things. And that's what's going to happen here.”

Donald Rumsfeld (1932) U.S. Secretary of Defense

DOD news briefing following the fall of Baghdad (11 April 2003) http://www.defenselink.mil/transcripts/2003/tr20030411-secdef0090.html

People , Food , Freedom , Water

“A long bow and a strong bow, and let the sky grow dark!
The cord to the nock, the shaft to the ear, and the king of Koth for a mark!”

Robert E. Howard (1906–1936) American author

Song of the Bossonian Archers
"The Scarlet Citadel" (1933)

Strong

“It rained. The procession of weary soldiers became a bedraggled train, despondent and muttering, marching with churning effort in a trough of liquid brown mud under a low, wretched sky. Yet the youth smiled, for he saw that the world was a world for him, though many discovered it to be made of oaths and walking sticks. He had rid himself of the red sickness of battle. The sultry nightmare was in the past. He had been an animal blistered and sweating in the heat and pain of war. He turned now with a lover's thirst to images of tranquil skies, fresh meadows, cool brooks — an existence of soft and eternal peace.
Over the river a golden ray of sun came through the hosts of leaden rain clouds.”

Stephen Crane book The Red Badge of Courage

Source: The Red Badge of Courage (1895), Ch. 24

Pain , War , Youth , World

“There may be "pie in the sky when you die" but how the pie is dished out on the ground has considerable existential relevance.”

Eric Wolf (1923–1999) American anthropologist

Preface (1997), p. x.
Europe and the People Without History, 1982

“Down swept the gathered waters over rocks
Which broke at times the column's foaming line;
Darkening amid the snow-white froth, it swept
Like an all conquering army, and an arch
Of sparkling hues that in the sunbeams played
Seemed to unite it with the sky which hung
Above all calmness and repose :”

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

(16th February 1822) Poetic Sketches, No.6
The London Literary Gazette, 1821-1822

Water , Time

“When April winds
Grew soft, the maple burst into a flush
Of scarlet flowers. The tulip tree, high up,
Opened in airs of June her multitude
Of golden chalices to humming-birds
And silken-wing'd insects of the sky.”

William Cullen Bryant (1794–1878) American romantic poet and journalist

The Fountain http://www.gutenberg.org/files/16341/16341-h/16341-h.htm#page227, st. 3 (1839)

Flowers , Bird , Tree

“When a man is actually with God, and then sees what he has tried to do and in our terms done so marvellously. it amounts to something which is utterly inadequate. That's what I'm saying: that the steeple reaching up so far, far away, that Salisbury Cathedral has a beautiful steeple, but what is it compared with the sky into which it is reaching? It is in this comparison that one is aware of on the one hand the absurdity of our efforts, and on the other the inadequacy of them”

Malcolm Muggeridge (1903–1990) English journalist, author, media personality, and satirist

Interview with Bill Buckley

God , Beauty , Effort

“Christopher Columbus discovered the West Indies, and Alexander Graham Bell invented the telephone. We do not call their achievements creations because they are not personal enough. The West Indies were there all the time; and as for the telephone, we feel that Bell's ingenious thought was somehow not fundamental. The groundwork was there, and if not Bell then someone else would have stumbled on the telephone almost as accidently as on the West Indies.
By contrast, we feel that Othello is genuinely a creation. This is not because Othello came out of a clear sky; it did not. There were Elizabethan dramatists before William Shakespeare, and without them he could not have written as he did. Yet within their tradition Othello remains profoundly personal; and though every element in the play has been a theme of other poets, we know that the amalgam of these elements is Shakespeare's; we feel the presence of his single mind. The Elizabethan drama would have gone on without Shakespeare, but no one else would have written Othello…”

Jacob Bronowski (1908–1974) Polish-born British mathematician

Source: The Creative Process, 1958, p. 97-98: As quoted in: S.P. Sector (‎1997). A Study of Issues Relating to the Patentability of Biotechnological Subject Matter. Footnote 51. https://www.ic.gc.ca/eic/site/ippd-dppi.nsf/eng/ip00201.html

Feeling , Time , Personality

“Shortly afterwards the moon rose with a very clear sky, and [he] kept watch.”

Giovanni Boccaccio book The Decameron

E poco appresso levatasi la luna, e 'l tempo essendo chiarissimo, [egli] vegghiava.
Fifth Day, Third Story (tr. J. M. Rigg)
The Decameron (c. 1350)

“I am ice and dust. I am sky.
I can see horses wading through snowdrifts.
My broken hearts, my fabulous dances.
My fleeting song, fleeting.
The world is so loud. Keep falling. I'll find you.”

Kate Bush (1958) British recording artist; singer, songwriter, musician and record producer

Song lyrics, 50 Words for Snow (2011)

World , Heart , Horse , Dance

“It was a love of the air and sky and flying, the lure of adventure, the appreciation of beauty. It lay beyond the descriptive words of men — where immortality is touched through danger, where life meets death on equal plane; where man is more than man, and existence both supreme and valueless at the same time.”

Charles Lindbergh (1902–1974) American aviator, author, inventor, explorer, and social activist

Thoughts on his first parachute jump in The Spirit of St Louis (1953)

Love , Life , Death , Men

“Like a trembling hind pursued by a Hyrcanian tigress, or like a pigeon that checks her flight when she sees a hawk in the sky, or like a hare that dives into the thicket at sight of the eagle hovering with outstretched wings in the cloudless sky.”
...ceu tigride cerva Hyrcana cum pressa tremit, vel territa pennas colligit accipitrem cernens in nube columba, aut dumis subit, albenti si sensit in aethra librantem nisus aquilam, lepus.

Silius Italicus Punica

Book V, lines 280–284
Punica

“willow of crystal, a poplar of water,
a pillar of fountain by the wind drawn over,
tree that is firmly rooted and that dances,
turning course of a river that goes curving,
advances and retreats, goes roundabout,
arriving forever:
the calm course of a star
or the spring, appearing without urgency,
water behind a stillness of closed eyelids
flowing all night and pouring out prophecies,
a single presence in the procession of waves
wave over wave until all is overlapped,
in a green sovereignty without decline
a bright hallucination of many wings
when they all open at the height of the sky, course of a journey among the densities
of the days of the future and the fateful
brilliance of misery shining like a bird
that petrifies the forest with its singing
and the annunciations of happiness
among the branches which go disappearing,
hours of light even now pecked away by the birds,
omens which even now fly out of my hand, an actual presence like a burst of singing,
like the song of the wind in a burning building,
a long look holding the whole world suspended,
the world with all its seas and all its mountains,
body of light as it is filtered through agate,
the thighs of light, the belly of light, the bays,
the solar rock and the cloud-colored body,
color of day that goes racing and leaping,
the hour glitters and assumes its body,
now the world stands, visible through your body,
and is transparent through your transparency”

Octavio Paz (1914–1998) Mexican writer laureated with the 1990 Nobel Prize for Literature

Sun Stone (1957)

Fate , World , Color , Mountain

“I agree that it's very difficult to come to an absolute definition of what's moral and what is not. We are on our own, without a god, and we have to get together, sit down together and decide what kind of society do we want to live in. Do we want to live in a society where people steal, where people kill, where people don't pull their weight paying their taxes, doing that kind of thing? Do we want to live in a kind of society where everybody is out for themselves in a dog-eat-dog world? And we decide in conclave together that that's not the kind of world in which we want to live. It's difficult. There is no absolute reason why we should believe that that's true - it's a moral decision which we take as individuals - and we take it collectively as a collection of individuals. If you want to get that sort of value system from religion I want you to ask yourself - whereabouts in religion do you get it? Which religion do you get it from? They're all different. If you get it from the Judeo-Christian-Islamic tradition then I beg you - don't get it from your holy book! Because the morality you will get from reading your holy book is hideous. Don't get it from your holy book. Don't get it from sucking up to your god. Don't get it from saying “oh, I'm terrified of going to hell so I'd better be good” - that's a very ignoble reason to be good. Instead - be good for good reasons. Be good for the reason that's you've decided together with other people the society we want to live in: a decent humane society. Not one based on absolutism, not one based on holy books and not one based on sucking up to.. looking over your shoulder to the divine spy camera in the sky.”

Richard Dawkins (1941) English ethologist, evolutionary biologist and author

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=roFdPHdhgKQ&t=59m29s
Richard Dawkins vs. Jonathan Sacks - BBC's RE:Think Festival (2012)

God , People , Books , World

“The city itself swung slowly toward us silent as a dream. No sign of life but puffs of steam from skyscraper chimneys, the motion of the traffic. The mighty towers stood like tombstones in a graveyard, leaning against the sky and waiting for -- for what? Someday we'll know.”

Edward Abbey (1927–1989) American author and essayist

"Manhattan Twilight, Hoboken Night", p. 98
The Journey Home (1977)

Life , Dreams , Waiting

“Should've played the bloody Sky Golem. And now he's got my other one. Give it BACK!”

TotalBiscuit (1984–2018) British game commentator

Hearthstone series, Randuin 2 Electric Boogaloo (January 13, 2015)

“The sun has burst the sky
Because I love you
And the river its banks.”

Jenny Joseph (1932–2018) Poet

Poem The sun has burst the sky http://www.poemhunter.com/poem/the-sun-has-burst-the-sky/

Love , Sun

“A black star appears, a point of darkness in the night sky's clarity. Point of darkness and gateway to repose. Reach out, pierce the fine fabric of the sheltering sky, take repose.”

Paul Bowles book The Sheltering Sky

Source: The Sheltering Sky (1949), p. 210

Star , Appearance , Night

“There is a deepness in the sky, and it extends forever.”

Vernor Vinge book A Deepness in the Sky

A Deepness in the Sky (1999)

“And the water below gives a gift to the sky
And the clouds give back every time that they cry
And make the grass grow green beneath my toes.”

Jack Johnson (musician) (1975) American musician

Talk of the Town.
Song lyrics, Sing-A-Longs and Lullabies for the Film Curious George (2006)

Grass , Water , Time , Cry

“On September 16, 1978, there was an eclipse of the moon in Riyadh. Late one afternoon it became visible: a dark shadow moving slowly across the face of the pale moon in the darkening blue sky. There was a frantic knocking on the door. When I opened it, our neighbor asked if we were safe. He said it was the Day of Judgement, when the Quran says the sun will rise from the west and the seas will flood, when all the dead will rise and Allah's angels will weigh our sins and virtue, expediting the good to Paradise and the bad to Hell. Though it was barely twilight, the muezzin suddenly called for prayer--not one mosque calling carefully after another, as they usually did, but all the mosques clamoring all at once, all over the city. There was shouting across the neighborhood. When I looked outside I saw people praying in the street.”

Ayaan Hirsi Ali book Infidel

Source: Infidel (2007), Ch. 3

People , Angels , Hell , Sun

“Painting is the magic art, the fire set alight on the windows of the rich dwelling, as on those of the humble hovel, from the last rays of the setting sun, it is the long mark, the humid mark, the fluent and still mark that the dying wave etches on the hot sand, it is the darting of the immortal lizard on the rock burnt by the midday heat, it is the rainbow of conciliation, on sad May afternoons, after the storm has passed, down there, making a dark backdrop to the almond trees in flower, to the gardens with their washed colours, to the ploughmen's huts, smiling and tranquil, it is the livid cloud chased by the vehement blowing of Aeolus enraged, it is the nebulous disk of the fleeting moon behind the ripped-open funereal curtain of a disturbed sky in the deep of night, it is the blood of the bull stabbed in the arena, of the warrior fallen in the heat of battle, of Adonis' immaculate thigh wounded by the obstinate boar's curved tusk, it is the sail swollen with the winds of distant seas, it is the centuries-old tree browned in the autumn..”

Giorgio de Chirico (1888–1978) Italian artist

Quote from the first lines in De Cirico's essay 'Painting', 1938; from http://www.fondazionedechirico.org/wp-content/uploads/211_Painting_1938_Metaphysical_Art.pdf 'Painting', 1938 - G. de Chirico, presentation to the catalogue of his solo exhibition Mostra personale del pittore Giorgio de Chirico, Galleria Rotta, Genoa, May 1938], p. 211
1920s and later

Sadness , Smile , Art , Flowers

“While Mona Lisas and Mad Hatters,
Sons of bankers, sons of lawyers
Turn around and say good morning to the night.
For unless they see the sky,
But they can't and that is why
They know not if it's dark outside or light.”

Elton John (1947) English rock singer-songwriter, composer and pianist

Mona Lisas and Mad Hatters
Song lyrics, Honky Château (1972)

Light , Madness , Night

“Gradually, very gradually, we saw the great mountain sides and glaciers and aretes, now one fragment and now another through the floating rifts, until far higher in the sky than imagination had dared to suggest the white summit of Everest appeared.”

George Mallory (1886–1924) British mountaineer

Mount Everest, The Reconnaissance (1921), Chapter XII: The Northern Approach, "The Reconnaissance of the Mountain", p. 186

Imagination , Mountain , Appearance

“…we see a number of sophisticated, yet uneducated, theoreticians who are conversant in the LSZ formalism of the Heisenberg field operators, but do not know why an excited atom radiates, or are ignorant of the quantum theoretic deerivation of Rayleigh's law that accounts for the blueness of the sky.”

J. J. Sakurai (1933–1982) American physicist

Modern Quantum Mechanics, Second Edition, Addison-Wesley, 2011.

Law

“Oh, sun! that o'er the western mountains now
Goest down in glory! ever beautiful
And blessed is thy radiance, whether thou
Colourest the eastern heaven and night-mist cool,
Till the bright day-star vanish, or on high
Climbest and streamest thy white splendours from mid-sky.”

William Cullen Bryant (1794–1878) American romantic poet and journalist

A Walk At Sunset http://www.gutenberg.org/files/16341/16341-h/16341-h.htm#page33, st. 2 (1821)

Beauty , Mountain , Star , Sun

“Oh, is it not enough to be
Here with this beauty over me?
My throat should ache with praise, and I
Should kneel in joy beneath the sky.
Oh, beauty are you not enough?”

Sara Teasdale Spring Night

"Spring Night"
Rivers to the Sea (1915)

Beauty , Joy

“Might have been the moonlight,
Caught up in the sparkle in your eyes.
So wicked and I know I should go slow but it's not in me to wait.Cause I'm alive and I'm on fire.
Shot like a starburst into the sky.
And the fury of desire it burns so bright electrifies
You light me up, you take me higher.”

Sarah McLachlan (1968) Canadian musician, singer, and songwriter

Loving You Is Easy
Song lyrics, Laws of Illusion (2010)

Light

“What the Big Bang theory tells us, is that at least our region of the universe 13.82 years ago, was an extremely hot, dense uniform soup of particles which in the conventional standard Big Bang model filled literally all of space—and now we certainly believe that it filled essentially all of the space that we have access to—uniformly. …This is contrary to a popular cartoon image of the Big Bang, which is just plain wrong. The cartoon image of the Big Bang is the image of a small egg of highly dense matter that then exploded and spewed out into empty space. That is not the scientific picture of the Big Bang. …If there was a small egg that exploded into empty space, you would certainly expect that today you would see something different if you were looking towards where the egg was, versus looking the opposite direction, but we don't see any effect like that. When we look around the sky the universe looks completely uniform, on average, in all directions, to a very high degree of accuracy… So we don't see a sign of an egg having happened anywhere. Rather, the Big Bang seems to have happened everywhere, uniformly.”

Alan Guth (1947) American theoretical physicist and cosmologist

Lecture 1: Inflationary Cosmology: Is Our Universe Part of a Multiverse? Part I.
The Early Universe (2012)

Universe

“And the eyes of all look upward seeing sign-word drawing nigh,
The stony wings of Egypt coming back across the sky;

We hear the clinking tamborine of Miriam anew;
We believe in every miracle since Lindbergh flew the blue —

The wonder of the long draw when the bowstring is a thread —
The beauty of a courage that can raise the wings of lead.”

Nathalia Crane (1913–1998) American writer

Venus Invisible and Other Poems (1928), The Wings of Lead

Beauty , Courage , Drawing

“I stand at the window and see a house, trees, sky.
Theoretically I might say there were 327 brightnesses and nuances of colour. Do I have "327"? No. I have sky, house, and trees. It is impossible to achieve "327 " as such. And yet even though such droll calculation were possible and implied, say, for the house 120, the trees 90, the sky 117 -- I should at least have this arrangement and division of the total, and not, say, 127 and 100 and 100; or 150 and 177.
The concrete division which I see is not determined by some arbitrary mode of organization lying solely within my own pleasure; instead I see the arrangement and division which is given there before me. And what a remarkable process it is when some other mode of apprehension does succeed! I gaze for a long time from my window, adopt after some effort the most unreal attitude possible. And I discover that part of a window sash and part of a bare branch together compose an N.”

Max Wertheimer (1880–1943) Co-founder of Gestalt psychology

Max Wertheimer (1923). "Laws of organization in perceptual forms." Translation published in W. D. Ellis (Ed.), A source book of Gestalt psychology, pp. 71–94. London, England: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1938. (Original title: Untersuchungen zur Lehre von der Gestalt II); Online http://psychclassics.yorku.ca/Wertheimer/Forms/forms.htm at psychclassics.yorku.ca, accessed 03.2017.

Pleasure , Lying , Effort , Tree

“What now if the sky were to fall?”

Terence Heauton Timorumenos

Act IV, scene 3, line 41 (719).
Heauton Timorumenos (The Self-Tormentor)

“All this countryside [along the Seine] was calm and peaceful. The strongest emotions I have experienced on the high roads or on the hill tops whence I could see down into the valleys on tot he roofs of houses which I felt I could reach out and touch with my hand.. And then I was tempted to begin painting [c. 1893 - 17 years old]... I composed instinctively and awkwardly. I applied colors with only one idea which justified everything: to express what I felt. I painted hesitantly and exclusively for myself and no one else. It seemed to me that water, sky, clouds and trees understood the happiness they gave me.”

Maurice de Vlaminck (1876–1958) French painter

Source: Quotes dated, Dangerous Corner', 1929, p. 46

Peace , Color , Idea , Tree

“This second time round, she’d discovered that to be happy was not so much a self-sufficient, spontaneous emotion, such as you might feel in relation to a dream or a secret, but a way of reacting to the rest of the world; that to be happy this time, she must curb the natural human instinct to look up at the sky, with its all-encompassing definition, and gaze towards the immediate ground and horizon, with its lack of shape, or abode, or clear ending.”

Amit Chaudhuri (1962) contemporary Indian-English novelist

Real Time (2002)

Secret , World , Dreams , Way

“I, the ocean of mind, drink all creation’s waves.
The four veils of solid, liquid, vapor, light,
Lift aright.
Myself, in everything,
Enters the Great Myself.
Gone forever,
The fitful, flickering shadows of a mortal memory.
Spotless is my mental sky,
Below, ahead, and high above.
Eternity and I, one united ray.
I, a tiny bubble of laughter,
Have become the Sea of Mirth Itself.”

Paramahansa Yogananda (1893–1952) Yogi, a guru of Kriya Yoga and founder of Self-Realization Fellowship

Songs of the Soul by Paramahansa Yogananda, Quotes drawn from the poem "Samadhi"

Drink , Laughter , Light , Memory

“.. the flag is green with a red spot in the center; above, the blue of the sky, the orange-tinted white of the walls, and the orange-grey of the clouds.”

Georges Seurat (1859–1891) French painter

short notation, 1881: from 'Notes inedites de Seurat sur Delacroix', in 'Bulletin de la Vie Artistique', April 1922; as quoted by John Rewald, in Georges Seurat', a monograph https://ia800607.us.archive.org/23/items/georges00rewa/georges00rewa.pdf; Wittenborn and Compagny, New York, 1943. p. 6 - note 9
Seurat studied carefully the paintings of Eugene Delacroix, and wrote in 1881 about Delacroix's painting 'The Fanatics of Tangier' https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/a/a0/Eug%C3%A8ne_Delacroix_-_The_Fanatics_of_Tangier_-_WGA06195.jpg this notation
Quotes, 1881 - 1890

“I worked hard the whole day, so that I am very tired now. Yesterday I made the sketch of the castle [in Vorden] on the canvas and today I painted the sky, the whole day long. I made the composition even more simple by leaving out the creel; the air is painted in the spirit of the [ Swartzwald [? ], but much more stronger and sadder. I hope to show the people how beautiful, how profoundly poetical the castle [is].... please save this thumbnail-sketch [drawn in the letter, on the same paper] and also my previous letter. Who knows the descendants - when reading them, and looking at the sketch - will say: Look, it was in this way how Bilder's very lovely painting was discussed at the House 't Velde, and how it came into life in Vorden. Good-by, my dear Lady..”

Johannes Warnardus Bilders (1811–1890) painter from the Northern Netherlands

translation from Dutch, Fons Heijnsbroek
version in original Dutch (citaat van Johannes Warnardus Bilders' brief, in het Nederlands:) Ik heb den gehelen dag hart gewerkt. Zoo dat ik erg moede ben. gisteren had ik de schets van t kasteel [in Vorden] op t' doek gebracht en vandaag heb ik de gehelen dag aan de lucht geschildert , ik heb de compositie nog eenvoudiger gemaakt door de vischkaar weg te laten; de lucht is in de geest van t [Swartzwald[?], maar nog veel sterker en droeviger, ik hoop de menschen te laten zien, hoe schoon, hoe diep poetisch, het kasteel bi.. ..bewaar de krabbel èn ook mijn voorgaande brief, wie weet als het nageslacht, die dan leest, en de krabbel ziet of ze dan niet zeggen, zie op deze wijze kwam dit schoonste schilderij van Bilders in t leven, t werd op ’t Velde besproken, en te Vorden in 't leven geroepen, dag zeer geliefde juffrouw..
J.W. Bilders, in his letter [including a sketch by pen of the landscape with the castle, seen from the garden of the hotel where he stayed] to Georgina van Dijk van 't Velde, from Vorden, 1 Sept. 1868; from an excerpt of the letter https://rkd.nl/nl/explore/excerpts/751236 in the RKD-Archive, The Hague
1860's + 1870's

Love , Life , People , Beauty

“I remember, I remember
The fir-trees dark and high;
I used to think their slender tops
Were close against the sky:
It was a childish ignorance,
But now 'tis little joy
To know I'm farther off from Heaven
Than when I was a boy.”

Thomas Hood (1799–1845) British writer

I Remember, I Remember, st. 4.
1820s

Boy , Thinking , Tree , Joy

“The huge church is burrowed into ancient mountains. By elevator you rise up through the mountain to the foot of a giant cross that soars nearly 500 feet into an intense blue sky, its arms spreading 300 feet. The four Evangelists who crouched at the base are 28 feet high, carved out of stone. All Spain comes to the Valley of the Fallen for its moment of meditation. It is a wondrous work, but it never lets you forget that it marks one of man's most ghastly works—war. But war—like all pain—is soon forgotten. New generations are born. And inMadrid you see families together, voluble, chattering, touching each other, husbands, wives, children. They smile at each other, and at you. And you smile back. For that is the true Madrid. It embraces you. It loves you. Soon, you love it back.”

Arnold Hano (1922) American writer

From "Madrid: The City Simpatico," https://books.google.com/books?id=_DAcznaeZSIC&pg=PA76&dq=%22The+huge+church+is+burrowed%22&hl=en&sa=X&ved=0CBQQ6AEwAGoVChMI4aylrdTGxwIVRc2ACh0cbAXy#v=onepage&q=%22The%20huge%20church%20is%20burrowed%22&f=false in Boys' Life (February 1970), p. 76
Other Topics

Love , Pain , War , Children

“Since I have spread my wings to purpose high,
The more beneath my feet the clouds I see,
The more I give the winds my pinions free,
Spurning the earth and soaring to the sky.”

Giordano Bruno (1548–1600) Italian philosopher, mathematician and astronomer

As quoted in "Giordano Bruno" by Thomas Davidson, in The Index Vol. VI. No. 36 (4 March 1886), p. 429

“Who would have thought that [director] Cameron Crowe had a movie as bad as Vanilla Sky in him? It's a punishing picture, a betrayal of everything that Crowe has proved he knows how to do right.”

Stephanie Zacharek (1963) American film critic

Review http://www.salon.com/ent/movies/review/2001/12/14/vanilla/index.html of Vanilla Sky (2001)

Betrayal

“The prairies were dust. Day after day, summer after summer, the scorching winds blew the dust and the sun was brassy in a yellow sky. Crop after crop failed. Again and again the barren land must be mortgaged for taxes and food and next year’s seed. The agony of hope ended when there was not harvest and no more credit, no money to pay interest and taxes; the banker took the land. Then the bank failed.”

Rose Wilder Lane (1886–1968) American journalist

On the Way Home, ch. 1 (1962).

Money , Food , Hope , Sun

“When I die
let the black rag fly
raven falling
from the sky.”

George Woodcock (1912–1995) Canadian writer of political biography and history, an anarchist thinker, an essayist and literary critic

"Black Flag" in Collected Poems (1983)

Flying

“This is how we go on: one day a time, one meal at a time, one pain at a time, one breath at a time. Dentists go on one root canal at a time; boat builders go on one hull at a time. If you write books, you go on one page at a time. We turn from all we know and all we fear. We study catalogues, watch football games, choose Sprint over AT&T. We count the birds in the sky and will not turn from the window when we hear the footsteps behind as something comes up the hall; we say yes, I agree that clouds often look like other things - fish and unicorns and men on horseback - but they are really only clouds. Even when the lightning flashes inside them we say they are only clouds and turn our attention to the next meal, the next pain, the next breath, the next page. This is how we go on.”

Stephen King book Bag of Bones

Bag of Bones (1998)

Men , Pain , Books , Fear

“Why We See Things and Not the Holes Between Them. We can now attempt an answer to the question why we do so. Two of the factors of organization which we have so far discussed seem to me to be the most important causes of this effect. In the first place, the segregation and unification which occurs will separate areas of different degrees of internal articulation, and according to our law, the more highly articulated ones will become figures, the rest fusing together to form the ground. Look at any landscape photograph. You see the shape of the things, the mountains, and trees and buildings, but not of the sky.”

Kurt Koffka (1886–1941) German psychologist

Source: Principles of Gestalt Psychology, 1935, p. 208-9

Law , Mountain , Question , Tree

“The dusky night rides down the sky,
And ushers in the morn;
The hounds all join in glorious cry,
The huntsman winds his horn,
And a-hunting we will go.”

Henry Fielding (1707–1754) English novelist and dramatist

A-Hunting We Will Go (1734), st. 1

Cry , Night

“Passion isn't something that lives way up in the sky, in abstract dreams and hopes. It lives at ground level, in the specific details of what you're doing every day.”

Marcus Buckingham (1966) British writer

Author Marcus Buckingham, cited in: Michel Beaudry, " Sam Rees - making the Whistler leap http://www.piquenewsmagazine.com/whistler/sam-rees-making-the-whistler-leap/Content?oid=2519430," at piquenewsmagazine.com, November 28, 2013.

Dreams , Hope , Way , Passion

“We are introduced to Iraq, "a sovereign nation"…In this peaceable kingdom, according to Moore's flabbergasting choice of film shots, children are flying little kites, shoppers are smiling in the sunshine, and the gentle rhythms of life are undisturbed. Then—wham! From the night sky come the terror weapons of American imperialism. Watching the clips Moore uses, and recalling them well, I can recognize various Saddam palaces and military and police centers getting the treatment. But these sites are not identified as such. In fact, I don't think Al Jazeera would, on a bad day, have transmitted anything so utterly propagandistic. You would also be led to think that the term "civilian casualty" had not even been in the Iraqi vocabulary until March 2003…the "insurgent" side is presented in this film as justifiably outraged, whereas the 30-year record of Baathist war crimes and repression and aggression is not mentioned once.That this—his pro-American moment—was the worst Moore could possibly say of Saddam's depravity is further suggested by some astonishing falsifications. Moore asserts that Iraq under Saddam had never attacked or killed or even threatened (his words) any American. I never quite know whether Moore is as ignorant as he looks, or even if that would be humanly possible…Baghdad was the safe house for the man whose "operation" murdered Leon Klinghoffer…In 1991, a large number of Western hostages were taken by the hideous Iraqi invasion of Kuwait and held in terrible conditions for a long time. After that same invasion was repelled—Saddam having killed quite a few Americans and Egyptians and Syrians and Brits in the meantime and having threatened to kill many more—the Iraqi secret police were caught trying to murder former President Bush during his visit to Kuwait. Never mind whether his son should take that personally…Iraqi forces fired, every day, for 10 years, on the aircraft that patrolled the no-fly zones and staved off further genocide in the north and south of the country…And it was after, and not before, the 9/11 attacks that Abu Mussab al-Zarqawi moved from Afghanistan to Baghdad and began to plan his now very open and lethal design for a holy and ethnic civil war.”

Christopher Hitchens (1949–2011) British American author and journalist

2004-06-21
Unfairenheit 9/11
Slate
1091-2339
http://www.slate.com/articles/news_and_politics/fighting_words/2004/06/unfairenheit_911.html: On Michael Moore
2000s, 2004

Life , War , Children , Secret

“My walk home was lengthened by a diversion in the direction of the kirk. When beneath its walls, I perceived decay had made progress, even in seven months - many a window showed black gaps deprived of glass; and slates jutted off, here and there, beyond the right line of the roof, to be gradually worked off in coming autumn storms.

I sought, and soon discovered, the three head-stones on the slope next the moor - the middle one, gray, and half buried in heath - Edgar Linton's only harmonized by the turf and moss, creeping up its foot - Heathcliff's still bare.

I lingered round them, under that benign sky; watched the moths fluttering among the heath and harebells; listened to the soft wind breathing through the grass; and wondered how any one could ever imagine unquiet slumbers for the sleepers in that quiet earth.”

Emily Brontë book Wuthering Heights

Mr. Lockwood (Ch. XXXIV). (Closing lines).
Wuthering Heights (1847)

Home , Imagination , Autumn , Grass

“Are we not madder than those first inhabitants of the plain of Sennar? We know that the distance separating the earth from the sky is infinite, and yet we do not stop building our tower.”

Denis Diderot (1713–1784) French Enlightenment philosopher and encyclopædist

No. 4
On the Interpretation of Nature (1753)

“It was first surmised by the ancient philosopher, Democritus, that the faintly white zone which spans the sky under the name of the Milky Way, might be only a dense collection of stars too remote to be distinguished. This conjecture has been verified by the instruments of modern astronomers.”

Robert Chambers (publisher, born 1802) book Vestiges of the Natural History of Creation

Source: Vestiges of the Natural History of Creation (1844), p. 3-4

Way , Star

“The efficient accounting and business methods which are supposed to characterize capitalist firms did not drop from the sky. They are the result of historical evolution, and in that evolution the exploitation of Africa played a key role”

Walter Rodney book How Europe Underdeveloped Africa

Source: How Europe Underdeveloped Africa (1972), p. 292.

Business

“What about [my] books? How do I feel about them?
I enjoyed writing all of them. But I think that if I could only choose a few, which, for example, might escape World War Three, I would choose, first, Eye in the Sky. Then The Man in the High Castle. Martian Time-Slip (published by Ballantine). Dr. Bloodmoney (a recent Ace novel). Then The Zap Gun and The Penultimate Truth, both of which I wrote at the same time. And finally another Ace book, The Simulacra.
But this list leaves out the most vital of them all: The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch. I am afraid of that book; it deals with absolute evil, and I wrote it during a great crisis in my religious beliefs. I decided to write a novel dealing with absolute evil as personified in the form of a "human." When the galleys came from Doubleday I couldn't correct them because I could not bear to read the text, and this is still true.
Two other books should perhaps be on this list, both very new Doubleday novels: Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? and another as yet untitled Ubik]. Do Androids has sold very well and has been eyed intently by a film company who has in fact purchased an option on it. My wife thinks it's a good book. I like it for one thing: It deals with a society in which animals are adored and rare, and a man who owns a real sheep is Somebody… and feels for that sheep a vast bond of love and empathy. Willis, my tomcat, strides silently over the pages of that book, being important as he is, with his long golden twitching tail. Make them understand, he says to me, that animals are really that important right now. He says this, and then eats up all the food we had been warming for our baby. Some cats are far too pushy. The next thing he'll want to do is write SF novels. I hope he does. None of them will sell.”

Philip K. Dick (1928–1982) American author

"Self Portrait" (1968), reprinted in The Shifting Realities of Philip K. Dick (1995), ed. Lawrence Sutin

Love , War , Truth , Books

“Water—the mighty, the pure, the beautiful, the unfathomable—where is thy element so glorious as it is in thine own domain, the deep seas? What an infinity of power is in the far Atlantic, the boundary of two separate worlds, apart like those of memory and of hope! or in the bright Pacific, whose tides are turned to gold by a southern sun, and in whose bosom sleep a thousand isles, each covered with the verdure, the flowers, and the fruit of Eden! But, amid all thy hereditary kingdoms, to which hast thou given beauty, as a birthright, lavishly as thou hast to thy favourite Mediterranean? The silence of a summer night is now sleeping on its bosom, where the bright stars are mirrored, as if in its depths they had another home and another heaven. A spirit, cleaving air midway between the two, might have paused to ask which was sea, and which was sky. The shadows of earth and earthly things, resting omen-like upon the waters, alone shewed which was the home and which the mirror of the celestial host.”

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

Heath's book of Beauty, 1833 (1832)

World , Beauty , Hope , Home

“Grieving, yet somehow unbending, steadfast, unafraid, the voice rose through the evening like memory, and a gust of wind blew up from the river, dimming the song, rustling the trees, then died and became still. I’ll lay in de grave and stretch out my arms … Suddenly the voice ceased, and all was quiet.
Then what I done was wrong, Lord? I said. And if what I done was wrong, is there no redemption?
I raised my eyes upward but there was no answer, only the gray impermeable sky and night falling fast over Jerusalem.”

William Styron book The Confessions of Nat Turner

Part I : Judgment Day
The Confessions of Nat Turner (1967)

Tree , Memory , Night

“No one was praying for the night to pass quickly. The stars were but sparks of the immense conflagration that was consuming us. Were this conflagration to be extinguished one day, nothing would be left in the sky but extinct stars and unseeing eyes.”

Elie Wiesel book Night

Night (1960)

Star , Night

“Science and art may invent splendid modes of illuminating the apartments of the opulent; but these are all poor and worthless compared with the common light which the sun sends into all our windows, which he pours freely, impartially over hill and valley, which kindles daily the eastern and western sky; and so the common lights of reason, and conscience, and love, are of more worth and dignity than the rare endowments which give celebrity to a few.”

William Ellery Channing (1780–1842) United States Unitarian clergyman

Self-Culture (1838)

Love , Art , Light , Science

“Five years have passed; five summers, with the length
Of five long winters! and again I hear
These waters, rolling from their mountain-springs
With a sweet inland murmur.—Once again
Do I behold these steep and lofty cliffs,
Which on a wild secluded scene impress
Thoughts of more deep seclusion; and connect
The landscape with the quiet of the sky.”

William Wordsworth book Lyrical Ballads

Stanza 1.
Lyrical Ballads (1798–1800), Lines written a few miles above Tintern Abbey (1798)

Mountain , Spring , Water , Winter

“Through the mad mystic hammering of the wild ripping hail,
The sky cracked its poems in naked wonder,
That the clinging of the church bells blew far into the breeze
Leaving only bells of lightning and its thunder
Striking for the gentle, striking for the kind,
Striking for the guardians and protectors of the mind,
An’ the poet and the painter far behind his rightful time
An’ we gazed upon the chimes of freedom flashing.”

Bob Dylan (1941) American singer-songwriter, musician, author, and artist

Song lyrics, Another Side of Bob Dylan (1964), Chimes of Freedom

Freedom , Time , Madness

“Man is the nobler growth our realms supply,
And souls are ripened in our northern sky.”

Anna Laetitia Barbauld (1743–1825) English author

The Invitation.
Bartlett's Familiar Quotations, 10th ed. (1919)

Soul

“Aim for the sky and you’ll reach the ceiling. Aim for the ceiling and you’ll stay on the floor.”

Bill Shankly (1913–1981) Scottish footballer and manager

Attributed to Shankly in 2013, thirty years after Shankly's death. However, very similar sayings are found anonymously from the late twentieth-century.
Disputed
Source: http://www.empireofthekop.com/2013/07/26/liverpool-should-aim-for-epl-title-and-possibly-finish-in-the-top-four-by-liverpool_red1/
Source: Harrington and Kavanagh, Prayer for Parish Groups: Preparing and Leading Prayer for Group Meetings https://books.google.com/books?id=tnpYzxOSsDoC&pg=PT120&dq=%22Aim+for+the+sky%22+ceiling&hl=en&sa=X&ved=0CCUQ6AEwAGoVChMIoszvpuGkyAIVyD6ICh0pVwwm#v=onepage&q=%22Aim%20for%20the%20sky%22%20ceiling&f=false, p. 32, 1998