An undevout astronomer is mad.
-- Edward Young

    The sun, the moon and the stars would have disappeared long ago ... had they happened to be within the reach of predatory human hands.
-- Havelock Ellis, The Dance of Life, 1928

The sky is the daily bread of the eyes.
-- Ralph Waldo Emerson, Journal, 25 May 1843 entry   

I never saw a man who looked
With such a wistful eye
Upon that little tent of blue
Which prisoners call the sky.
-- Oscar Wilde, The Ballad of Reading Gaol

         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.
-- Ralph Waldo Emerson, History, in Essays: First Series, 1841.

   Blessed moon
noon
of night
that through the dark
bids Love
stay.
-- William Carlos Williams, Full Moon, 1924.

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.
-- Joseph Conrad, Lord Jim, 1900

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.
-- Russell Baker, New York Times, 21 July 1969

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.
-- D. H. Lawrence, Introduction to The Dragon of the Apocalypse by Frederick Carter, London Mercury, July 1930

Moon!
Moon!
I am prone before you.
Pity me,
And drench me in loneliness.
-- Amy Lowell, On a Certain Critic

The meek-ey'd Morn appears, mother of dews.
--Edward Bulwer Lytton, Summer

  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.
-- Henry David Thoreau, Walden Pond

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

  The sun is but a morning star.
-- Henry David Thoreau, Walden, 1854

  The Sun, the hearth of affection and life, pours burning love on the delighted earth.
-- Arthur Rimbaud, Soleil et Chair, Collected Poems, 1962

   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.
-- Wallace Stevens, The Young Wallace Stevens, 20 April 1920 entry, 1966

 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.
-- Willa Cather, One of Ours, 1928

    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.
-- Oscar Wilde, Vivian, in The Decay of Lying, Intentions, 1891

    Silently, one by one,
in the infinite meadows of the heaven,
blossumed the lovely stars,
the forget-me-nots of the angels.
-- Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, Evangeline, 1847

 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.
-- Edward Bulwer Lytton, When Stars are in the quiet Skies

  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!
-- Andre Malraux