Night Sky Quotes

“If the stars should appear one night in a thousand years, how would men believe and adore; and preserve for many generations the remembrance of the city of God which had been shown! But every night come out these envoys of beauty, and light the universe with their admonishing smile.”
― Ralph Waldo Emerson, Nature and Selected Essays

“The sky grew darker, painted blue on blue, one stroke at a time, into deeper and deeper shades of night.”
― Haruki Murakami, Dance Dance Dance

“All shadows of clouds the sun cannot hide
like the moon cannot stop oceanic tide;
but a hidden star can still be smiling
at night's black spell on darkness, beguiling”
― Munia Khan

“I know that I am mortal by nature, and ephemeral; but when I trace at my pleasure the windings to and fro of the heavenly bodies I no longer touch the earth with my feet: I stand in the presence of Zeus himself and take my fill of ambrosia”
― Ptolemy, Ptolemy's Almagest

“Before we invented civilization our ancestors lived mainly in the open out under the sky. Before we devised artificial lights and atmospheric pollution and modern forms of nocturnal entertainment we watched the stars. There were practical calendar reasons of course but there was more to it than that. Even today the most jaded city dweller can be unexpectedly moved upon encountering a clear night sky studded with thousands of twinkling stars. When it happens to me after all these years it still takes my breath away.”
― Carl Sagan, Pale Blue Dot: A Vision of the Human Future in Space

“The true joy of a moonlit night is something we no longer understand. Only the men of old, when there were no lights, could understand the true joy of a moonlit night.”
― Yasunari Kawabata, Palm of the Hand Stories

“It is a beautiful and delightful sight to behold the body of the Moon.”
― Galileo Galilei, The Starry Messenger, Venice 1610: "From Doubt to Astonishment"

“A sunset is the sun’s fiery kiss to the night.”
― Crystal Woods, Write like no one is reading 3

“Mortal as I am, I know that I am born for a day. But when I follow at my pleasure the serried multitude of the stars in their circular course, my feet no longer touch the earth.”
― Ptolemy

“Some praise the Lord for Light,
The living spark;
I thank God for the Night
The healing dark.”
― Robert William Service

“The light at night is special because the overwhelming light of day has left us, and the remaining half draws on everything it has to keep the world around us bright.”
― Mieko Kawakami, All the Lovers in the Night

“He was there alone with himself, collected, tranquil, adoring, comparing the serenity of his heart with the serenity of the skies, moved in the darkness by the visible splendors of the constellations, and the invisible splendor of God, opening his soul to the thoughts which fall from the Unknown. In such moments, offering up his heart at the hour when the flowers of night inhale their perfume, lighted like a lamp in the center of the starry night, expanding his soul in ecstasy in the midst of the universal radiance of creation, he could not himself perhaps have told what was passing in his own mind; he felt something depart from him, and something descend upon him, mysterious interchanges of the depths of the soul with the depths of the universe.”
― Victor Hugo, Les Misérables

“a silent night. - the most eloquent poem i have ever read.”
― Sanober Khan

“Maybe life is all about twirling under one of those midnight skies,
cutting a swathe through the breeze
and gently closing your eyes.”
― Sanober Khan

“Was this the bright vastness the poet Bashō saw when he wrote of the Milky Way arched over a stormy sea?”
― Yasunari Kawabata, Snow Country

“It's quiet in the car, in a good way for once. No words, no music. Silence seems right. I roll down the windows and lean my head against the door frame, listening to the wind rush by and smelling the pine trees. I watch the stars materialize, like someone is dimming the switch on the night sky so each shining dot grows brighter and brighter.”
― Jennifer Salvato Doktorski, How My Summer Went Up in Flames

“Is there not
A tongue in every star that talks with man,
And wooes him to be wise? nor wooes in vain;
This dead of midnight is the noon of thought,
And wisdom mounts her zenith with the stars.”
― Anna Letitia Barbauld

“That black, maddening firmament; that vast cosmic ocean, endlessly deep in every direction, both Heaven and Pandemonium at once; mystical Zodiac, speckled flesh of Tiamat; all that is chaos, infinite and eternal. And yet, it's somehow the bringing to order of this chaos which perhaps has always disturbed me most. The constellations, in their way, almost bring into sharper focus the immensity and insanity of it all - monsters and giants brought to life in all their gigantic monstrosity; Orion and Hercules striding across the sky, limbs reaching for lightyears, only to be dwarfed by the likes of Draco, Pegasus, or Ursa Major. Then bigger still - Cetus, Eridanus, Ophiuchus, and Hydra, spanning nearly the whole of a hemisphere, sunk below the equator in that weird underworld of obscure southern formations. You try to take them in - the neck cranes, the eyes roll, and the mind boggles until this debilitating sense of inverted vertigo overcomes you...”
― Mark X., Citations: A Brief Anthology

“It's the moon that moves me. The sunlight makes everything so obvious.”
― Bavo Dhooge, Styx

“The fires of night
through distance dance
ghosts who still know how to sing”
― Tamara Rendell, Mystical Tides

“The storm long past, the night sky was beset with stars. Pointing upward, I asked her to pick a point of light and stay with it. Standing up, I eased Sara to her feet. Whispering into her ear, I asked, “Have you ever stood under a star... and felt the earth move under your feet?”
― Michael Poeltl, The Judas Syndrome

“Hope is a helium balloon. It is a wish lantern set out into the dark sky of night.”
― Sharon Weil

“Overhead the night was a superb arch of clear frost, sifted with stars.”
― Christopher Morley, The Haunted Bookshop

“Look there.” Regina pointed toward the northern sky. “Polaris.”
Viktor looked up. “The constant north star, one of man’s most dependable guides.”
“Polaris will be waiting for us there when we are old and have experienced a lifetime of joys and regrets,” Regina said, a wistful note in her voice. “That fact makes me feel like one of God’s most insignificant creatures.”
― Patricia Grasso, Seducing the Prince

“The night sky shouldn't be so dark," Peter had told her. "If the universe is endless, then starlight should fill all the empty spaces. Light doesn't stop until it hits a surface - so why the dark spaces? From where we stand on Earth, all we should see is light."
"Maybe the universe isn't limitless, then," Alice had said.
"Or the universe is expanding," Peter had said. "And the stars are too young, and all that distant light is still stretching to reach us. And until it does, the night lies dark.”
― R.F. Kuang, Katabasis

“The stars grow tired, shrug their shoulders, and fall out of the sky, wearing nothing but robes of comet-white. Is she not one of the stars? She casts off her robes—steps into my room—and composes constellations.”
― Moses Yuriyvich Mikheyev, A Fire in the Sunset: A Decade of Love Poems

“We both took a deep breath, facing each other in the moonlight, the whites of his eyes flashing and his dark irises the same colour as the sky. Touch seemed like something I had never experienced before. All my senses were heightened by the thrill of my environment: the night sky, the light air, the sound of the water lapping on the hull of the water taxi and the distant murmur of water on the rocks.”
― Emili Lemon

“Your scars are like stars in the night sky. It echoes the pain from your darkest moments, and makes your strength a feat worth emulating.”
― Michael Bassey Johnson, Stamerenophobia

“There, in the middle of the bay, were the stars and the whole night waiting.”
― Erin Gough, Into the Mouth of the Wolf

“When he wrote Meditations, Marcus Aurelius was the most powerful man in the world. He had, quite literally, a whole empire at his disposal. Cities, armies, palaces. All were his. He spent over a decade, from the year 161 to 180, as Roman emperor during the 'Golden Age'. And yet he resisted seeking any contentment in his status and power, in favour of simplicity, consultation and a cosmic perspective. He believed watching the stars was important and talks about Pythagoras - the early Greek philosopher and founder of Pythagoreanism - as his influence here.
The Pythagoreans saw gazing up at the sky not just as a pleasant thing to do, but an insight into a divine order. Because stars are all separate, but all together in an order. For the Stoics, looking at them was looking at unveiled glimpses of divinity - and also fragments of Nature.
It is not just the sky or the stars, then, that are important, but what we think when we look at them. Our connection to the shifting world around and above us.
'The universe is change', wrote Marcus Aurelius. 'Our life is what our thoughts make it.'
Even a man in charge of an empire could look at the stars and feel happily small in the grand universal order of things.
The sky doesn't start above us. There is no starting point for sky. We live in the sky.”
― Matt Haig, The Comfort Book