And God said, “Let there be a dome in the midst of the waters, and let it separate the waters from the waters.” So God made the dome and separated the waters that were under the dome from the waters that were above the dome. And it was so. God called the dome Sky.

-Genesis 1:6-8 NRSV Bible  

The sky is the daily bread of the eyes.

-Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803-1882), Journal 25 May 1843  

Go forth under the open sky, and list To Nature's teachings.

-William Cullen Bryant (1794-1878)

I was blue, just as blue as I could be
Ev'ry day was a cloudy day for me
Then good luck came a-knocking at my door
Skies were gray but they're not gray anymore
Blue skies smiling at me
Nothing but blue skies do I see

-Irving Berlin (1888-1989), Blue Skies, 1926

The heavens declare the glory of God; the skies proclaim the work of his hands.   Day after day they pour forth speech; night after night they display knowledge. There is no speech or language where their voice is not heard.

-King David (c. 1000 B.C.), King of Israel 
from Psalm 19 NIV Bible  

That the sky is brighter than the earth means little unless the earth itself is appreciated and enjoyed.

-Helen Keller (1880-1968)

Surely there is something in the unruffled calm of nature that overawes our little anxieties and doubts; the sight of the deep-blue sky, and the clustering stars above, seem to impart a quiet to the mind.

-Jonathan Edwards (1703-1758)  

We thank Thee for this place in which we dwell; for the love that unites us; for the peace accorded us this day; for the hope with which we expect the morrow; for the health, the work, the food, and the bright skies that make our lives delightful

- Robert Louis Stevenson (1850-1894), A Christmas Prayer

When I consider your heavens,
the work of your fingers,
the moon and the stars,
which you have set in place,
what is man that you are mindful of him,
the son of man that you care for him?

-Psalm 8:3-4 NIV Bible  

Yes, I know, this is nothing but thy love, O beloved of my heart--this golden light that dances upon the leaves, these idle clouds sailing across the sky, this passing breeze leaving its coolness upon my forehead.

-Rabindranath Tagore (1861–1941), Gintanjali, 1910  

An undevout astronomer is mad.

-Edward Young (1683-1765)

For all its silence, the sky has a language. Without any words the stars speak many things right into our hearts. They hang there so silent and radiant—and how one’s breast swells at the thought of being able to attain the same purity. At times it seems as if their light is of little benefit. Yet it is by them we measure hours, days, and years. By them – or at least by the star nearest to us, the sun – we have light and heat, and our existence depends on it. And isn’t it written that when the Son of Man appears in the heavens, the second coming is at hand?

-Christoph Friedrich Blumhardt (1842-1919), The Language of the Sky

However, if you do not obey the Lord your God and do not carefully follow all his commands and decrees I am giving you today, all these curses will come upon you… The sky over your head will be bronze, the ground beneath you iron. The Lord will turn the rain of your country into dust and powder; it will come down from the skies until you are ruined.

-Deuteronomy 28:15, 24 NIV Bible

It was a night such as one sees perhaps half a dozen times a winter. The sky was less a sky of earth than interstellar space itself revealed in its pure and overarching height, an abyss timeless and remote and sown with an immense glittering of stars in their luminous rivers and pale mists, in their solitary and unneighbored splendors, in their ordered figures, and dark, half-empty fields. It was the middle of the evening and in the north over a lonely farm, a great darkness of the forest, and one distant light, the dipper, stood on its handle, each star radiant in the blue and empty space about the pole.

-Henry Beston (1888-1968), Northern Farm, 1948

…we cannot bear to see anything in the sky that is solid and enduring, anything in the sky that does not change like the clouds of the sky.

-G. K. Chesterton (1874–1936), “In the Place de la Bastille,” 
Tremendous Trifles, 1909

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

-Havelock Ellis (1859–1939)

What springs from earth dissolves to earth again, and heaven-born things fly to their native seat.

-Marcus Aurelius (121-180 A.D.)

To me, the glory of the heavens is most evident at night--a cold, clear night when the stars are more brilliant than diamonds. The wise men looked at the stars, and what they saw called them away from their comfortable dwellings and toward Bethlehem. When I look at the stars I see God's glory in the wonder of creation.

-Madeleine L'Engle (1918-2007), 
Glimpses of Grace: Daily Thoughts and Reflections, 1996

Watch the stars, and from them learn. To the Master's honor all must turn, each in its track, without a sound, forever tracing Newton's ground.

-Albert Einstein (1879-1955)

You must understand the whole of life, not just one little part of it. That is why you must read, that is why you must look at the skies, that is why you must sing and dance, and write poems, and suffer, and understand, for all that is life.

-J. Krishnamurti (1895-1986)

The misuse of astrology is to be opposed, but the heavenly bodies do have influence on our life. God works through nature and Christ pointed to the signs of the heavens. The great stars often bring great changes.

-Theophrastus von Hohenheim, a.k.a. Paracelsus (1493/94-1541)

Two things inspire me to awe -- the starry heavens above and the moral universe within.

-Albert Einstein (1879-1955)

The world stands out on either side
No wider than the heart is wide;
Above the world is stretched the sky,
No higher than the soul is high.
The heart can push the sea and land
Farther away on either hand;
The soul can split the sky in two,
And let the face of God shine through.

-Edna St. Vincent Millay (1892–1950), Renascence

Oh! In his rapture he was weeping even over those stars, which were shining to him from the abyss of space, and he was not ashamed of that ecstasy. There seemed to be threads from all those innumerable worlds of God, linking his soul to them, and it was trembling all over in contact with other worlds.

-Fyodor Dostoyevsky (1821-1881), The Brothers Karamazov, 1880

I believe in one God—sole, eternal—He who motionless, moves all the heavens with his love and his desire… This is the origin, this is the spark that then extends into a vivid flame, and, like a star in heaven, glows in me.

-Dante Alighieri (1265-1321), Paradiso XXIV  

If we look at the makeup of the word disaster, dis-aster, we see dis, which means separation, and aster, which means star. So dis-aster is separation from the stars. Such separation is disaster indeed. When we are separated from the stars, the sea, each other, we are in danger of being separated from God.

-Madeline L'Engle (1918-2007), A Stone for a Pillow, 1986

Of all the problems of conservation, none is more urgent that the polluted air which endangers the American people. We have been fortunate so far. But we have seen that when winds fail to blow, the concentrations of poisonous clouds over our cities can become perilous. Air pollution is a threat to health, especially of older persons. It contributes significantly to the rising rates of chronic respiratory ailments. It stains our cities and towns with ugliness, soiling and corroding whatever it touches. Its damage extends to our forests and farmlands as well. The economic toll for our neglect amounts to billions of dollars each year.

-Lyndon B. Johnson (1908-1973) 36^th President of the U. S., 
Special Message to Congress, “To Renew a Nation” 8 Mar 1968

The sky is low, the clouds are mean

-Emily Dickinson (1830–1886)

When I heard the learn’d astronomer
When the proofs, the figures, were ranged in columns before me
When I was shown the charts and the diagrams, to add,
     divide, and measure them;
When I, sitting, heard the astronomer, where he lectured
     with much applause in the lecture-room,
How soon, unaccountable, I became tired and sick;
Till rising and gliding out, I wander’d off by myself,
In the mystical moist night-air, and from time to time,
Look’d up in perfect silence at the stars.

-Walt Whitman (1819-1892), Leaves of Grass, 1855

By reading the scriptures I am so renewed that all nature seems renewed around me and with me. The sky seems to be a pure, a cooler blue, the trees a deeper green… The whole world is charged with the glory of God and I feel fire and music…under my feet.

-Thomas Merton (1915-1968), Thoughts in Solitude, 1958

It is the first mild day of March:
Each minute sweeter than before
The redbreast sings from the tall larch
That stands beside our door.

There is a blessing in the air,
Which seems a sense of joy to yield
To the bare trees, and mountains bare,
And grass in the green field.

-William Wordsworth (1770-1850), To My Sister

These are the seven stars which come and go through the ages and the religions. Collectively known to the medieval past by the fine name of "The Plough," the configuration is today the Great Dipper to beholders, and gathered thus into a household and utilitarian shape, places something of our small humanity in the shoreless oceans of the sky.

-Henry Beston (1888-1968), Northern Farm, 1948

Stop and consider God’s wonders. 
Do you know how God controls the clouds 
and makes his lightning flash? 
Do you know how the clouds hang poised, 
those wonders of him who is perfect in knowledge? 
You who swelter in your clothes
when the land lies hushed under the south wind,
can you join him in spreading out the skies,
hard as a mirror of cast bronze?

Elihu in Job 37:15-18 NIV Bible

And what of the glorious stars? They hang there so silent and radiant—and how one's breast swells at the thought of being able to attain the same purity... At times it may seem that their light is of little benefit. Yet it is by them that we measure hours, days, and years; by them—or at least by the star nearest to us, the sun—we have light and heat, and our existence depends on it. What are we, then, that we should be served by such powers? Are we great or small? Compared to heaven's vastness, we are certainly very small. But our calling is great, and so is our hope. For even if Christ's return from the skies seems too much for us—too great to be grasped—let us remember that this is how he shall come: "When the Son of Man appears in the heavens, the second coming is at hand." And let us therefore give the skies our attention.

-Christoph Friedrich Blumhardt (1842-1919), The Language of the Sky

El que quiera azul celeste, que le cueste.
[If you want the blue sky, the price is high]

- Costa Rican proverb 
quoted in Barbara Kingsolver’s Small Wonder, 2002

The air of one’s native country is the most healthy air.

-Anton Pavlovich Chekhov (1860–1904), Letter to G.M. Chekhov, 
January 1895  

The sky was as full of motion and change as the desert beneath it was monotonous and still,—and there was so much sky, more than at sea, more than anywhere else in the world. The plain was there, under one’s feet, but what one saw when one looked about was that brilliant blue world of stinging air and moving cloud. Even the mountains were mere ant-hills under it. Elsewhere the sky is the roof of the world; but here the earth was the floor of the sky. The landscape one longed for when one was away, the thing all about one, the world one actually lived in, was the sky, the sky!

-Willa Cather (1873–1947), Death Comes for the Archbishop, 1927

Lord, I have loved Your sky,
Be it said against or for me,
Have loved it clear and high,
Or low and stormy

-Robert Frost (1874–1963), “Astrometaphysical”

A clear stream, a long horizon, a forest wilderness and open sky—these are man's most ancient possessions. In a modern society, they are his most priceless.

-Lyndon B. Johnson (1908-1973) 36th President of the United States,
Special Message to Congress, "To Renew a Nation"
8 Mar 68  

And I have felt a presence that disturbs me with the joy
of elevated thoughts; a sense sublime
of something far more deeply interfused,
whose dwelling is the light of setting suns,
and the round ocean and the living air,
and the blue sky, and in the mind of man:
a motion and a spirit, that impels
all thinking things, all objects of all thought,
and rolls through all things.

-William Wordsworth (1770-1850), "Tintern Abbey"

Thank God men cannot as yet fly and lay waste the sky as well as the earth!

Henry David Thoreau (1817-1862)

I think one of the deepest experiences a scientist can have, almost approaching a religious awakening, is to realize that we are children of the stars, and that our minds are capable of understanding its Universal Laws that they obey. The atoms in our bodies were forged on the anvil of nucleo-synthesis within an exploding star aeons before the birth of the solar system. Our atoms are older than the mountains. We are literally made of stardust.

-Michin Kaku, Hyperspace, 1994

Maybe it’s our sky that makes us crazy.

-Kathleen Norris, Dakota, 1993

And over all the sky—the sky! far, far out of reach,
studded, breaking out, the eternal stars.

-Walt Whitman (1819–1892), Bivouac on a Mountain Side  

I say that the filling of a man's native sky with smoke or the selling of his roof over his head illustrate the sort of things he ought to have some say in, if he is supposed to be governing himself. But owing to the strange trend of recent society, these enormous earthquakes he has to pass over and treat as private trivialities.

-G. K. Chesterton (1874–1936), A Miscellany of Men, “The Thing” 1912 

There are also heavenly bodies and there are earthly bodies; but the splendor of the heavenly bodies is one kind, and the splendor of the earthly bodies is another. The sun has one kind of splendor, the moon another and the stars another; and star differs from star in splendor.

-Paul in his letter to Corinth, 1 Corinthians 15:40-41 NIV Bible

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