The first question concerning the Celestial Bodies is whether there be a system, that is whether the world or universe compose together one globe, with a center, or whether the particular globes of earth and stars be scattered dispersedly, each on its own roots, without any system or common center.
Expect nothing, live frugally on surprise. Become a stranger to need of pity. Or if compassion be freely given out, take only enough. Stop short of the urge to plead, then purge away the need. Wish for nothing larger than your own small heart or greater than a star. Tame wild disappointment with caress, unmoved and cold. Make of it a parka for your soul. Discover the reason why so tiny human midget exists at all, so scared and so unwise. But expect nothing, live frugally on surprise.
All of the rocky and metallic material we stand on, the iron in our blood, the calcium in our teeth, the carbon in our genes were produced billions of years ago in the interior of a red giant star. We are made of star stuff.
If anyone cannot feel the power of God when he looks upon the stars, then I doubt whether he is capable of feeling at all. From the enduring wonder of the heavens flows all grace and power. If anyone thinks it is mindless then he himself must be out of his mind.
A day will come when beings, now latent in our thoughts and hidden in our loins, shall stand upon Earth as a footstool and laugh, and reach out their hands amidst the stars.
I wrote and directed and acted in it and produced it, every job I have since that - and Star Wars included - I look at it completely different now. Now that I've seen how it gets made, I can appreciate the jobs that people are doing, and it's also become a different learning experience for me to work on things because I'm watching pros at the top of their field do their jobs and just picking up on their tricks and all of their expertise and stashing them away in my brain.
Romeo, of dead, should be cut up into little stars to make the heavens fine. Life, with this pair, has no other aim, asks no more,than Juliet,--than Romeo.
Torrent of light and river of air,
Along whose bed the glimmering stars are seen,
Like gold and silver sands in some ravine
Where mountain streams have left their channels bare!
O, when I am safe in my sylvan home,
I mock at the pride of Greece and Rome;
And when I am stretch'd beneath the pines
When the evening star so holy shines,
I laugh at the lore and pride of man,
At the Sophist's schools, and the learned clan;
For what are they all in their high conceit,
When man in the bush with God may meet?
The relationship between science and the humanities is two-way. Science changes our view of the world and our place in it. In the other direction, the humanities provide the store of ideas and images and language available to us in understanding the world. The exploding star of A.D. 1054, the Crab Nebula, was sighted and documented by the Chinese, but nowhere mentioned in the West, where the Aristotelian notion of the immortality of stars still held sway. We often do not see what we do not expect to see.
We are all as much extraordinary phenomena of nature as trees, clouds, the patterns in running water, the flickering of fire, the arrangement of the stars and the form of a galaxy.