"What Is Love? I have met in the streets a very poor young man who was in love. His hat was old, his coat worn, the water passed through his shoes and the stars through his soul"
— Victor Hugo

"When it is dark enough, you can see the stars."
— Ralph Waldo Emerson

"I don't know anything with certainty, but seeing the stars makes me dream."
— Vincent Van Gogh

"Dwell on the beauty of life. Watch the stars, and see yourself running with them."
— Marcus Aurelius

"If I had to tell you how humans made their way to Earth, it would go like this: In the beginning, there was nothing at all but the moon and the sun. And the moon wanted to come out during the day, but there was something so much brighter that seemed to fill up all those hours. The moon grew hungry, thinner and thinner, until she was just a slice of herself, and her tips were as sharp as a knife. By accident, because that is the way most things happen, she poked a hole in the night and out spilled a million stars, like a fountain of tears.

Horrified, the moon tried to swallow them up. And sometimes this worked, because she got fatter and rounder.. But mostly it didn't, because there were just so many. The stars kept coming, until they made the sky so bright that the sun got jealous. He invited the stars to his side of the world, where it was always bright. What he didn't tell them, though, was that in the daytime, they'd never be seen. So the stupid ones leaped from the sky to the ground, and they froze under the weight of their own foolishness.

The moon did her best. She carved each of these blocks of sorrow into a man or a woman. She spent the rest of her time watching out so that her other stars wouldn't fall. She spent the rest of her time holding onto whatever scraps she had left.

"
— Jodi Picoult

"We all shine on...like the moon and the stars and the sun...we all shine on...come on and on and on..."
— John Lennon

"I love the stars.
Because they can't say anything.
I love the stars.
Because they do not judge anyone."
— Natsuki Takaya

"What I really want to tell him is to pick up that baby of his and hold her tight, to set the moon on the edge of her crib and to hang her name up in the stars."
— Jodi Picoult (My Sister's Keeper)

"Witches are naturally nosy,” said Miss Tick, standing up. “Well, I must go. I hope we shall meet again. I will give you some free advice, though.”
“Will it cost me anything?”
“What? I just said it was free!” said Miss Tick.
“Yes, but my father said that free advice often turns out to be expensive,” said Tiffany.
Miss Tick sniffed. “You could say this advice is priceless,” she said, “Are you listening?”
“Yes,” said Tiffany.
“Good. Now...if you trust in yourself...”
“Yes?”
“...and believe in your dreams...”
“Yes?”
“...and follow your star...” Miss Tick went on.
“Yes?”
“...you’ll still be beaten by people who spent their time working hard and learning things and weren’t so lazy. Goodbye."
— Terry Pratchett (The Wee Free Men)

""Chasing stars and loose their shadow,
Peter Pan and Wendy turned out fine,
So won't you fly with me?"
— Jonas Brothers

"Not just beautiful, though--the stars are like the trees in the forest, alive and breathing. And they're watching me."
— Haruki Murakami (Kafka on the Shore)

"Did you say the stars were worlds, Tess?"
"Yes."
"All like ours?"
"I don't know, but I think so. They sometimes seem to be like the apples on our stubbard-tree. Most of them splendid and sound - a few blighted."
"Which do we live on - a splendid one or a blighted one?"
"A blighted one."
— Thomas Hardy (Tess of the D'Urbervilles)

"There are 10^11 stars in the galaxy. That used to be a huge number. But it's only a hundred billion. It's less than the national deficit! We used to call them astronomical numbers. Now we should call them economical numbers."
— Richard P. Feynman

""I..." He struggled to answer. "When everything was quiet, I went up to the corridor and the curtain in the livingroom was open just a crack... I could see outside. I watched, only for a few seconds." He had not seen the outside world for twenty-two months.
There was no anger or reproach.
It was Papa who spoke.
"How did it look?"
Max lifted his head, with great sorrow and great astonishment. "There were stars," he said. "They burned by eyes.""
— Markus Zusak (The Book Thief)

"People have stars, but they aren't the same. For travelers, the stars are guides. For other people, they're nothing but tiny lights. And for still others, for scholars, they're problems. For my businessman, they were gold. But all those stars are silent stars. You, though, you'll have stars like nobody else."
"What do you mean?"

"When you look up at the sky at night, since I'll be living on one of them, since I'll be laughing on one of them, for you, it'll be as if all the stars are laughing. You'll have stars that can laugh!"

And he laughed again.

"And when you're consoled (everyone is eventually consoled), you'll be glad you've known me. You'll always be my friend. You'll feel like laughing with me. And you'll open your windows sometimes just for the fun of it... And your friends will be amazed to see you laughing while you're looking up at the sky. Then you'll tell them, 'Yes, it's the stars. They always make me laugh!'"
— Antoine de Saint-Exupéry (The Little Prince)

"Art is everywhere you look for it, hail the twinkling stars for they are God's careless splatters"
— El Greco

"What wretched poverty of language! To compare stars to diamonds!"
— Gustave Flaubert (Flaubert in Egypt: A Sensibility on Tour)

"To him the stars seemed like so many musical notes affixed to the sky, just waiting for somebody to unfasten them. Someday the sky would be emptied, but by then the earth would be a constellation of musical scores"
— Machado de Assis (The Devil's Church and Other Stories)

""Not everyone can be a star, but everyone can shine.""
— Lise Bennett

"Marius and Cosette were in the dark in regard to each other. They did not speak, they did not bow, they were not acquainted; they saw each other; and, like the stars in the sky separated by millions of leagues, they lived by gazing upon each other."
— Victor Hugo (Les Misérables)

"This is a place where grandmothers hold babies on their laps under the stars and whisper in their ears that the lights in the sky are holes in the floor of heaven."
— Rick Bragg

""its like you said? i lead my people-"
"forth!" zifnab carried on enthusiastically! " out of eygpt! out of bondage! across the desert! pillar of fire-"
"desert?" lenthan looked anxious again. "fire? i thought we were going to the stars!"
"sorry. wrong script" zifnab said"
— Margaret Weis (Elven Star)

"...putting out the stars and extinguishing the sun."
— Ray Bradbury (Fahrenheit 451)

"There was a sky somewhere above the tops of the buildings, with stars and a moon and all the things there are in a sky, but they were content to think of the distant street lights as planets and stars. If the lights prevented you from seeing the heavens, then preform a little magic and change reality to fit the need. The street lights were now planets and stars and moon. "
— Hubert Selby Jr. (Requiem for a Dream)

"Algol is the name of the winking demon star, Medusa of the skies; fair but deadly to look on, even for one who is already dying.

Ah, the bright stars of the night.

Almost they obliterate the clear white pain. A thousand stars shining in the ether; but no dazzling newcomer. And so little time left, so little time...

Yet still two-faced Medusa laughs from behind the clouds, demanding homage. Homage, Medusa, or a sword, a blade sharper than death itself.

The wind stirs. Night clouds obscure the universe. A lower music now, a different kind of death.

No stars tonight, my love.

No Selene."
— Elizabeth Redfern (The Music of the Spheres)

"It was a lone tree burning on the desert. A heraldic tree that the passing storm had left afire. The solitary pilgrim drawn up before it had traveled far to be here and he knelt in the hot sand and held his numbed hands out while all about in that circle attended companies of lesser auxiliaries routed forth into the inordinate day, small owls that crouched silently and stood from foot to foot and tarantulas and solpugas and vinegarroons and the vicious mygale spiders and beaded lizards with mouths black as a chowdog's, deadly to man, and the little desert basilisks that jet blood from their eyes and the small sandvipers like seemly gods, silent and the same, in Jeda, in Babylon. A constellation of ignited eyes that edged the ring of light all bound in a precarious truce before this torch whose brightness had set back the stars in their sockets."
— Cormac McCarthy (Blood Meridian: Or the Evening Redness in the West)

""Falling Stars"
IV

Do you remember still the falling stars

that like swift horses through the heavens raced

and suddenly leaped across the hurdles

of our wishes - do your recall? And we

did make so many! For there were countless numbers

of stars: each time we looked above we were

astounded by the swiftness of their daring play,

while in our hearts we felt safe and secure

watching these brilliant bodies disintegrate,

knowing somehow we had survived their fall."
— Rainer Maria Rilke

"We know that God is everywhere; but certainly we feel His presence most when His works are on the grandest scale spread before us: and it is the unclouded night-sky, where His worlds wheel their silent course, that we read clearest His infinitude, His omnipotence, His omnipresence."
— Charlotte Brontë

"The spaces between stars are where the work of the universe is done."
— Ivan Doig (This House of Sky: Landscapes of a Western Mind)

"And if the sun will set tonight, hold our secrets up to the sky, as our shadows grow there's nothing left to hide, and if you ever doubt you will know that i still wonder how many times did i compare the stars to your eyes."
— Amber Pacific

"When it gets dark enough, you can see the stars."
— Persian folk saying

"" When its dark enough you can see the stars. " "
— Charles Austin Beard

"Stars are like animals in the wild. We may see the young but never the actual birth, which is a veiled and secret event."
— Heinz R. Pagels

"We both wondered whether these contradictions that one can't avoid if one begins to think of time and space may not really be proofs that the whole of life is a dream, and the moon and stars bits of nightmare."
— Arthur Machen (The Terror)

"In this house with starry dome,
Floored with gemlike plains and seas
Shall never feel at home,
Never wholly be at ease?"
— Sir William Watson, "World Strangeness"

"For what's the use of talking with a man who has a disease and thinks about the stars?"
— Bertolt Brecht

"Then he went out without touching anything and put his arm around Ingeborg, and like that, with their arms around each other, they returned to the village while the whole past of the universe fell on their heads."
— Roberto Bolaño (2666)

"The stars we are given. The constellations we make. That is to say, stars exist in the cosmos, but constellations are the imaginary lines we draw between them, the readings we give the sky, the stories we tell."
— Rebecca Solnit (Storming the Gates of Paradise: Landscapes for Politics)