Date: 1594
"A far more glorious star thy soul will make / Than Julius Caesar or bright--"
preview | full record— Shakespeare, William (1564-1616)
Date: 1724
"As a Stone in a Wall, fastened with Mortar, compressed by surrounding Stones, and involved in a Million of other Attractions, cannot fall to the Earth, nor sensibly exert its natural Gravity, no, not so much as to discover there is such a Principle in it; just so, the intelligent Soul, in this h...
preview | full record— Cheyne, George (1671-1743)
Date: 1751, 1777
"Virtue, placed at such a distance, is like a fixed star, which, though to the eye of reason, it may appear as luminous as the sun in his meridian, is so infinitely removed, as to affect the senses, neither with light nor heat."
preview | full record— Hume, David (1711-1776)
Date: 1794
"It [Christianity] has put the whole orbit of reason into shade."
preview | full record— Paine, Thomas (1737-1809)
Date: 1796
"The effect [of wit on the mind] is strong,--because it's odd, / Like fire electric from a clod; / Or when fix'd air puts out a light, / Tho' vital makes it blaze more bright."
preview | full record— Courtenay, John Lees (1775?-1794)
Date: 1807
"Thy soul was like a Star, and dwelt apart."
preview | full record— Wordsworth, William (1770-1850)
Date: August 31, 1837
"But he, in his private observatory, cataloguing obscure and nebulous stars of the human mind, which as yet no man has thought of as such, — watching days and months, sometimes, for a few facts; correcting still his old records; — must relinquish display and immediate fame."
preview | full record— Emerson, Ralph Waldo (1803-1882)
Date: 1883
"Soaring through wider zones that pricked his scars / With memory of the old revolt from Awe, / He reached a middle height, and at the stars, / Which are the brain of heaven, he looked, and sank"
preview | full record— Meredith, George (1828-1909)
Date: 1997
"Mason had more than once caught the old Astronomer watching Susannah with a focus'd Patience he recogniz'd from the Sector Room...as if waiting for a sudden shift in the sky of Passion, like that headlong change in Star Position that had led him to the discovery of the Aberration of Light,-- wai...
preview | full record— Pynchon, Thomas (b. 1937)