Love is stronger than both fear and hope - if you can love the natural beauty around you, the amazing gifts and skills we have, the fact that you are alive to experience life, each moment that you have, and love yourself and those around you just as they are, then there is no need to be owned by fear, or even hope, you just live the best you can, being the truth of that love that you are being, representing the stream of consciousness experiencing itself, always knowing that you will someday return to it again, and flow as part of it infinitely on.
My feeling is that an observer needs to see four hundred and fifty stars to get that feeling of infinitude, and be swept away_and I didn__ make that number up arbitrarily, that__ the number of stars that are available once you get dimmer than third magnitude. So in the city, you see a dozen stars, a handful, and it__ attractive to no one. And if there__ a hundred stars in the sky it still doesn__ do it. There__ a certain tipping point where people will look and there will be that planetarium view. And now you__e touching that ancient core, whether it__ collective memories or genetic memories, or something else form way back before we were even human_astronomer Bob Berman quoted in The End of Night
The End of Night: Searching for Natural Darkness in an Age of Artificial Light
Quote Detail
My feeling is that an observer needs to see four hundred and fifty stars to get that feeling of infinitude, and be swept away_and I didn__ make that number up arbitrarily, that__ the number of stars that are available once you get dimmer than third magnitude. So in the city, you see a dozen stars, a handful, and it__ attractive to no one. And if there__ a hundred stars in the sky it still doesn__ do it. There__ a certain tipping point where people will look and there will be that planetarium view. And now you__e touching that ancient core, whether it__ collective memories or genetic memories, or something else form way back before we were even human_astronomer Bob Berman quoted in The End of Night
Quick Answer
What this quote page tells you
This canonical quote page keeps the full saying, the attributed author, any linked work, and the topic tags together so the quote can be cited from one stable URL.
Related Quotes
More quote cards from the same area
Everything that God sends us is beautiful, even though we may not understand it - and we only need to give it some proper thought to see that what God gives is just sheer happiness; the suffering is what we add to it.
We are souls, eternal and perfect, captains of our mystic ships: gods and goddesses of our universe. We are beautiful, we pearls of grit. We, the ember of everything. Our uniqueness IS what makes us special, and the expression of it is our gift to the rest of us. In order to feel happy and fulfilled, we must honour our own personal brand of creativity... let it out into the world... BE who we came here to BE.
There is no cosmetic for beauty like happiness.
All we Karamazovs are such insects. And angel as you are, that insect lives in you, too, and will stir up a tempest in your blood. Tempests, because sensual lust is a tempest - worse than a tempest! Beauty is a terrible and awful thing! It is terrible because it has not been fathomed and never can be fathomed, for God sets before us nothing but riddles. Here the boundaries meet and all contradictions exist side by side. I am not an educated nor cultured man, Alyosha, but I've thought a lot about this. It's terrible what mysteries there are! Too many riddles weigh men down on earth. We must solve as we can, and try to keep a dry skin in the water. Beauty! I can't bear the thought that a man of lofty mind and heart begins with the ideal of the Madonna and ends with the ideal of Sodom. What's still more awful is that a man with the ideal of Sodom in his soul does not renounce the ideal of the Madonna, and his heart may be on fire with that ideal, genuinely on fire, just as in his days of youth and innocence. Yes, man is broad, too broad. I'd have him narrower. The devil only knows what to make of it! What to the mind is shameful is beauty and nothing else to the heart. Is there beauty in Sodom? Believe me, that for the immense mass of mankind beauty is found in Sodom. Did you know that secret? The awful thing is that beauty is mysterious as well as terrible. God and the devil are fighting there and the battlefield is the heart of man.
Beauty is only skin deep but evil cuts straight through the soul.