Download A Poetic Interlude

The stars hang bright above,
silent, as if they watch over
the sleeping Earth.
Samuel Taylor Coleridge
All things are artificial, for
nature is the art of God.
Thomas Browne
Religio Medici, 1642
Twinkle, twinkle, little star…
How I wonder what you are.
Children’s nursery rhyme
For I dipped into the future,
far as human eye could see;
Saw the vision of the world,
and all the wonder that would be.
Alfred Lord Tennyson, 1842
So I walk on uplands unbounded,
and know that there is hope for
that which You formed out of dust
to have consort with things eternal.
The Dead Sea Scrolls
The oldest picture book in
our possession is the
nighttime sky.
E. Walter Maunder
The God whom science recognizes
must be a God of universal laws
exclusively, a God who does a
wholesale, not a retail business. He
cannot accommodate his processes
to the convenience of individuals.
William James
The Varieties of Religious Experience (1902)
The stars are not so strange
as the mind that studies
them.
H.E. Fosdick
Newton’s idea of gravity has
done nothing but astonish
our imagination.
Frederick the Great, 1780
Taken as a whole, the
universe is absurd.
Walter Savage Landor, 1824
The microscope enlarges
worlds we are too big to step
into… Telescopes reveal
worlds too young for us to fit
into.
Dusty Joseph Partello, 1907
Pluto is the last little outpost
before stepping out to the stars.
Steven Finch
The first day,
we all pointed to our countries…
The second day,
we all pointed to our continents…
The third day,
we were aware of only one Earth
Astronaut Sultan Bin Salman al-Saud
Kingdom of Saudi Arabia
The beauteous planet Venus,
which invites to love, makes all
the Orient laugh, outshining the
light of the fishes, which
followed close behind.
Dante, 1316
The Earth, formed out of the same
debris of which the sun was born,
existed at the center of a star that
exploded many billions of years ago.
Isaac Asimov
O star,
Say something to us we can learn,
Say something! And it said, ‘I burn.’
Robert Frost
When Newton saw an
apple fall, he found a
mode of proving that the
Earth turned round...
Lord Byron, 1810
What may only appear to be a white
puff of smoke in space is actually
the violent end of one stellar system
and the possible beginnings of
another.
P. Scoma, 1968
Galaxies are like cities of
stars suspended forever in
the blackness of night.
Denise Wolf, 1986
Man said to the universe, “I exist.”
“However,” replied the universe,
“that fact has not created in me a
sense of obligation.”
Stephen Crane, 1889
If the radiance of a thousand suns
were to burst into the sky, that would
be the splendor of the Mighty One...
The Bhagavad-Gita
Everyone is a moon and has a
dark side which he never shows
to anybody.
Mark Twain
What is inconceivable about the
universe is that it is at all conceivable.
Albert Einstein
Silence alone is great; all
else is weakness.
Alfred DeVigny
La Mort du Loup, 1864
Science can purify religion from
error and superstition; Religion
can purify science from idolatry
and false absolutes.
We need each other to be what we
must be, what we are called to be.
John Paul II, 1988