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

“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

“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

“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

“When we look up at night and view the stars, everything we see is shinning because of distant nuclear fusion.”
― Carl Sagan, Cosmos

“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

“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

“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

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

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

“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

“In the dark pre-dawn quiet he lay facing the window by his bed and stared at the stars hanging in the western sky. They floated over the land like the dust of jewels strewn across black water. These stars had become the milestones that marked his coming passage, and he gazed at them this one last time for the sake of preserving a memory, he supposed. One last view through the windowglass of his youth.”
― Mark Warren, The Long Road to Legend

“Indeed, if you think of night in the true, philosophical proportion, you must realize that it is the prevailing, the absolute thing. Light, day, burning suns and stars - all are the exceptions. They are but gleaming jewels spattered on the black cloth of darkness. Throughout the universe and eternity it is night that prevails. It is the mother of cosmos, capacious womb of light.”
― Donald Culross Peattie, An Almanac for Moderns

“The night is not a tumultuous black ocean in which you sink or sail as a star”
― Virginia Woolf, Jacob's Room

“The dark sky beckoned, the stars so dim and small, like speckles of frost.”
― Sarah J. Maas, A Court of Mist and Fury

“I studied the wings, the arm around my waist. 'Please don't drop me. And please don't-'

We shot into the sky, fast as a shooting star.

Before my yelp finished echoing, the city had yawned wide beneath us. Rhys's hand slid under my knees while the other wrapped around my back and ribs, and we flapped up, up, up into the star-freckled night, into the liquid dark and singing wind.

The city lights dropped away until Velaris was a rippling velvet blanket littered with jewels, until the music no longer reached even our pointed ears. The air was chill, but no wind other than a gentle breeze brushed my face- even as we soared with magnificent precision for the House of Wind.

Rhys' body was hard and warm against mine, a solid force of nature crafted and honed for this. Even the smell of him reminded me of the wind- rain and salt and something citrus-y I couldn't name.

We swerved into an updraft, rising so fast it was instinct to clutch his black tunic as my stomach clenched. I scowled at the soft laugh that ticked my ear. 'I expected more screaming from you. I must not be trying hard enough.'

'Do not,' I hissed, focusing on the approaching tiara of lights in the eternal wall of the mountain.

With the sky wheeling overhead and the lights shooting past below, up and down became mirrors- until we were sailing through a sea of stars. Something tight in my chest eased a fraction of its grip.”
― Sarah J. Maas, A Court of Mist and Fury