It was a day of gloom, and strange suspense, And feverish, and inexplicable dread, In Herculaneum's walls. The heavy, thick, And torrid atmosphere; the solid, vast, And strong--edg'd clouds, that through the firmament In various and opposing courses moved: The wild scream of the solitary bird That, at long intervals, flew terror-driven On high:--the howling of the red-ey'd dog As he gaz'd trembling on the angry heavens: The hollow moans that swept along the air, Though every wind was lock'd,-portended all That nature with some dire event was big, And labour'd in its birth.
Edwin AtherstoneRelated topics
air atmosphere bird birth day dog firmament heavy high nature strange suspense sweep thick trembling vast wild wind heavensRelated quotes
The mathematical thermology created by Fourier may tempt us to hope that, as he has estimated the temperature of the space in which we move, me may in time ascertain the mean temperature of the heavenly bodies: but I regard this order of facts as for ever excluded from our recognition. We can never learn their internal constitution, nor, in regard to some of them, how heat is absorbed by their atmosphere. We may therefore define Astronomy as the science by which we discover the laws of the geometrical and mechanical phenomena presented by the heavenly bodies.
Auguste Comte
The empire of Saturnus is gone by;
Lord of the secret birth of things is he;
Within the lap of earth, and in the depths
Of the imagination dominates;
And his are all things that eschew the light.
The time is o'er of brooding and contrivance,
For Jupiter, the lustrous, lordeth now,
And the dark work, complete of preparation,
He draws by force into the realm of light.
Now must we hasten on to action, ere
The scheme, and most auspicious positure
Parts o'er my head, and takes once more its flight,
For the heavens journey still, and adjourn not.
Friedrich Schiller
Of this voyage, I observe,' says the Admiral, 'that it has miraculously been shown, as may be understood by this writing, by the many signal miracles that He has shown on the voyage, and for me, who for so great a time was in the court of Your Highnesses with the opposition and against the opinion of so many high personages of your household, who were all against me, alleging this undertaking to be folly, which I hope in Our Lord will be to the greater glory of Christianity, which to some slight extent already has happened.
Christopher Columbus
God always was, and always is, and always will be. Or rather, God always Is. For Was and Will be are fragments of our time, and of changeable nature, but He is Eternal Being. And this is the Name that He gives to Himself when giving the Oracle to Moses in the Mount. For in Himself He sums up and contains all Being, having neither beginning in the past nor end in the future; like some great Sea of Being, limitless and unbounded, transcending all conception of time and nature, only adumbrated [intimated] by the mind, and that very dimly and scantily.
Gregory of Nazianzus
I have tried to imagine ... the various ingredients one might wish to compound in such a package. Beside the bare experience itself, the context of it, one might say, he should want to capture and hold all the subsidiary factors which might serve as a background for it - the sound, the feel of wind and sun, the cloud floating in the sky, the color and the scent. For such a packaging, to give the desired results, must be as perfect as one can make it. It must have all those elements which would be valuable in invoking the total recall of some event that had taken place many years before...
Clifford D. Simak