An undevout astronomer is mad.

The sun, the moon and the stars would have disappeared long ago ... had they happened to be within the reach of predatory human hands.

The sky is the daily bread of the eyes.

I never saw a man who looked
With such a wistful eye
Upon that little tent of blue
Which prisoners call the sky.

The man who has seen the rising moon break out of the clouds at midnight has been present like an archangel at the creation of light and of the world.

Blessed moon
noon
of night
that through the dark
bids Love
stay.

There is something haunting in the light of the moon; it has all the dispassionateness of a disembodied soul, and something of its inconceivable mystery.

So there he is at last. Man on the moon. The poor magnificent bungler! He can't even get to the office without undergoing the agonies of the damned, but give him a little metal, a few chemicals, some wire and twenty or thirty billion dollars and, vroom! there he is, up on a rock a quarter of a million miles up in the sky.

When we describe the moon as dead, we are describing the deadness in ourselves. When we find space so hideously void, we are describing our own unbearable emptiness.

Moon!
Moon!
I am prone before you.
Pity me,
And drench me in loneliness.

The meek-ey'd Morn appears, mother of dews.

To anticipate, not the sunrise and the dawn merely, but, if possible, Nature herself! How many mornings, summer and winter, before yet any neighbor was stirring about his business, have I been about mine! ... It is true, I never assisted the sun materially in his rising, but, doubt not, it was of the last importance only to be present at it.

Each time dawn appears, the mystery is there in its entirety.

The sun is but a morning star.

The Sun, the hearth of affection and life, pours burning love on the delighted earth.

The day of the sun is like the day of a king. It is a promenade in the morning, a sitting on the throne at noon, a pageant in the evening.

The sun was like a great visiting presence that stimulated and took its due from all animal energy. When it flung wide its cloak and stepped down over the edge of the fields at evening, it left behind it a spent and exhausted world.

Nobody of any real culture, for instance, ever talks nowadays about the beauty of sunset. Sunsets are quite old fashioned. . . . To admire them is a distinct sign of provincialism of temperament. Upon the other hand they go on.

Silently, one by one,
in the infinite meadows of the heaven,
blossumed the lovely stars,
the forget-me-nots of the angels.

When stars are in the quiet skies,
Then most I pine for thee;
Bend on me then thy tender eyes,
As stars look on the sea.

The greatest mystery is not that we have been flung at random among the profusion of the earth and the galaxy of the stars, but that in this prison, we can fashion images of ourselves, sufficiently powerful, to deny our nothingness!