Sourced

• Space is big. Really big. You won't believe how hugely mindboggling big it really is.
  • Douglas Adams - The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, 1979

• Although Uranus and Neptune are superficially twin planets, they are different enough to remind us - as do Venus and Earth - that we still have a lot to learn about the mix of natural laws and historical accidents that formed the planets and fashioned their destinies.
  • Timothy Ferris - Seeing in the Dark, 2002

• The wonder is, not that the field of stars is so vast, but that man has measured it.
  • Anatole France - The Garden of Epicurus, 1894

• Over the rim of waiting earth the moon lifted with majesty till it swung clear of the horizon and rode off, free of moorings...
  • Kenneth Grahame - The Wind in the Willows, 1908

• A strange weasel-built creature with a curly tail.
  • Johannes Hevelius on his newly described constellation Lacerta the lizard in 1687 - reported in SkyNews The Canadian Magazine of Astronomy and Stargazing September/October 2002.

• It's unique because it doesn't look like a comet with the typical tail; it looks like a cloud. It's not what you would normally see at all ... With the naked eye, it looks like a star or planet, but with binoculars it's really weird looking; it doesn't happen every day.
  • George Masterson, physics and astronomy teacher on Comet 17P/Holmes - quoted in "Mysteriously bright comet provides sky-high teaching moment at NHS" in the Daily News of Newburyport (9 November 2007)

• I open the scuttle at night and see the far sprinkled systems,
  And all I see multiplied as high as I can cyper edge but rim of the farthest systems.

  Wider and wider they spread, expanding, always expanding,
  Outward and outward, forever outward.

  • Walt Whitman - Leaves of Grass, 1855

• For astronomy is not only pleasant, but also very useful to be known: it cannot be denied that this art unfolds the admirable wisdom of God.
  • John Calvin - Commentary on the Book of Genesis, Chapter I.

Attributed

• Stars scribble in our eyes the frosty sagas, the gleaming cantos of unvanquished space.
  • Hart Crane

• Look at the stars! look, look up at the skies!
  O look at all the fire-folk sitting in the air!
  The bright boroughs, the circle citadels there!
  • Gerard Manley Hopkins

• Silently, one by one, in the infinite meadows of heaven, blossomed the lovely stars, the forget-me nots of the angels
  • Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

• The unquiet republic of the maze of planets, struggling fierce towards heaven's free wilderness.
  • Percy Bysshe Shelley

• Architects should be educated, skillful with the pencil, instructed in geometry, know much history, have followed the philosophers with attention, understand music, have some knowledge of medicine, know the opinions of the jurists, and be acquainted with astronomy and the theory of the heavens.
  • Vitruvius

• Up through the darkness,
  While ravening clouds, the burial clouds, in black masses spreading,
  Lower sullen and fast athwart and down the sky,
  Amid a transparent clear belt of ether yet left in the east,
  Ascends large and calm the lord-star Jupiter.
  • Walt Whitman