Marriage is the clue to human life, but there is no marriage apart from the wheeling sun and the nodding earth, from the strayingof the planets and the magnificence of the fixed stars.
Far in the pillared dark Thrush music went- Almost like a call to come in To the dark and lament. But no, I was out for stars: I would not come in. I meant not even if asked, And I hadn't been.
They adored each other; but still the permanent and the immutable subsist. We may love and laugh, pout, clasp hands, smile, and exchange endearments, but that does not affect eternity. Two lovers hide in the dusk of evening, amid flowers and the twittering of birds, and enchant each other with their hearts shinning in their eyes; but the stars in their course still circle through infinite space.
The lights of stars that were extinguished ages ago still reaches us. So it is with great men who died centuries ago, but still reach us with the radiations of their personalities.
For all our conceits about being the center of the universe, we live in a routine planet of a humdrum star stuck away in an obscure corner ... on an unexceptional galaxy which is one of about 100 billion galaxies. ... That is the fundamental fact of the universe we inhabit, and it is very good for us to understand that.
At a certain place in Beethoven's Ninth Symphony, for example, he might feel that he is floating above the earth in a starry dome, with the dream of immortality in his heart; all the stars seem to glimmer around him, and the earth seems to sink ever deeper downwards.
And to be merry best becomes you; for, out of question, you were born in a merry hour. BEATRICE No, sure, my lord, my mother cried; but then there was a star danced, and under that was I born.
The poetry of art is in beholding the single tower; the poetry of nature in seeing the single tree; the poetry of love in following the single woman; the poetry of religion in worshipping the single star.
Responsibility, n. A detachable burden easily shifted to the shoulders of God, Fate, Fortune, Luck or one's neighbor. In the days of astrology it was customary to unload it upon a star.
When lilacs last in the dooryard bloom'd / And the great star early droop'd in the western sky in the night, / I mourn'd, and yet shall mourn with ever-returning spring.
We must see that consciousness is neither an isolated soul nor the mere function of a single nervous system, but of that totality of interrelated stars and galaxies which makes a nervous system possible.