STAR-THING

Twinkle, twinkle, little star
How I wonder what you are.
Up above the world so high
Like a diamond in the sky
Twinkle, twinkle, little star
How I wonder what you are!

—Anonymous

So Thales, to study the stars, looked upwards, and fell into a hole. A servant girl from Thrace, charming and graceful, teased him for being so fixed on heaven that he could not see what was beneath his feet. Such ridicule also befits anyone who pursues wisdom.

—Plato :: Theaetetus

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

Starry, starry night.
Paint your palette blue and grey,
Look out on a summer's day,
With eyes that know the darkness in my soul.

—Don McLean

You shall know the nature of the aether and all the signs in the aether, and how they came to be under the destructive rays of the bright Sun's pure torch. And you shall learn the wandering ways of the round-eyed Moon, and its nature, and you shall know also the surrounding heaven, how it grew and how Necessity led and shackled it to hold the limits of the stars.

—Parmenides :: On Nature

The thunderbolt directs all things.

—Heraclitus