Chet Raymo > Quotes

“I am a child of the Milky Way. The night is my mother. I am made of the dust of stars. Every atom in my body was forged in a star. When the universe exploded into being, already the bird longed for the wood and the fish for the pool. When the first galaxies fell into luminous clumps, already matter was struggling toward consciousness. The star clouds of Sagittarius are a burning bush. If there is a voice in Sagittarius, I’d be a fool not to listen. If God’s voice in the night is a scrawny cry, then I’ll prick up my ears. If night’s faint lights fail to knock me off my feet, then I’ll sit back on a dark hillside and wait and watch. A hint here and a trait there. Listening and watching. Waiting, always waiting, for the tingle in the spine.”
― Chet Raymo, The Soul of the Night: An Astronomical Pilgrimage

“Beauty soaks reality as water fills a rag.”
― Chet Raymo, Honey from Stone: A Naturalist's Search for God

“카지노싸이트 is not a collection of facts. Nor is science something that happens in the laboratory. 카지노싸이트 happens in the head. It's a flight of imagination beyond the constraints of ordinary perception. Columbus chapter -The Virgin and the Mousetrap”
― Chet Raymo

“Nancy
According to astronomers, every atom in my body was forged in a star. I am made, they insist, of stardust. I am stardust braided into strands and streamers of information, proteins and DNA, double helixes of stardust. In every cell of my body there is a thread of stardust as long as my arm.”
― Chet Raymo, The Dork of Cork

“In Anton Chekhov’s play the Three Sisters, sister Masha refuses ‘to live and not know why the cranes fly, why children are born, why the stars are in the sky. Either you know and you’re alive or it’s all nonsense, all dust in the wind.’ Why? Why? The striving to know is what frees us from the bonds of self, said Einstein. It’s the striving to know, rather than our knowledge-which is always tentative and partial- that is important. Instead of putting computers in our elementary schools, we should take the children out into nature, away from those virtual worlds in which they spend unconscionable hours, and let them see an eclipsed Moon rising in the east, a pink pearl. Let them stand in a morning dawn and watch a slip of a comet fling its trail around the Sun…Let the children know. Let them know that nothing, nothing will find in the virtual world of e-games, television, or the Internet matters half as much as a glitter of strs on an inky sky, drawing our attention into the incomprehensible mystery of why the universe is here at all, and why we are here to observe it. The winter Milky Way rises in the east, one trillion individually invisible points of light, one trillion revelations of the Ultimate Mystery, conferring on the watcher a dignity, a blessedness, that confounds the dull humdrum of the commonplace and opens a window to infinity.”
― Chet Raymo, An Intimate Look at the Night Sky

“We inherit the spirit world from a time when our ancestors huddled in dark shelters at night and let their imaginations draw up creatures more or less like ourselves although lacking corporeal substance. But why should we care about angels when the season's first blackbirds spread their red-shouldered wings? Why should we seek treasures in Heaven when year after year the fiddlehead ferns unfurl their silver croziers along the brook? Why should we look for out-of-body experiences when it is our bodies that connect us through the five open windows of our senses to the sights, sounds, tastes, smells, and tactile sensations of nature?”
― Chet Raymo, The Path: A One-Mile Walk Through the Universe

“More things are learnt in the woods than from books; trees and rocks will teach you things not to be heard elsewhere. You will see for yourselves that honey may be gathered from stones and oil from the hardest rock. . . . St. Bernard of Clairvaux”
― Chet Raymo, Honey from Stone: A Naturalist's Search for God

“The mediocrity principle establishes our worth as equal to that of the universe.”
― Chet Raymo

“Fabre believed that the methods of science must be consistent with our motives for knowing.”
― Chet Raymo

“And suddenly we are back at Walden Pond, or on the tiny planet of the Little Prince, as poor as church mice and as rich as lords. I count every star in Sagittarius as mine. I kowtow to no one for their possession”
― chet raymo, The Soul of the Night: An Astronomical Pilgrimage

“Once I saw the Crab Nebula through a powerful telescope. The nebula is the expanding debris of an exploded star, a wreath of shredded star-stuff eight light-years wide and 5000 light-years away. What I saw in the telescope was hardly more than a blur of light, more like a smudge of dust on the mirror of the scope than the shards of a dying star. But seeing through a telescope is 50 percent vision and 50 percent imagination. In the blur of light I could easily imagine the outrushing shock wave, the expanding envelope of high-energy radiation, the torn filaments of gas, the crushed and pulsing remnant of the skeletal star. I stood for a quarter of an hour with my eye glued to the eyepiece of the scope. I felt a powerful sensation of energy unleashed, of an old building collapsing onto its foundations in a roar of dust at the precise direction of a demolition expert. As I watched the Crab Nebula, I felt as if I should be wearing earplugs, like an artilleryman or the fellow who operates a jackhammer. But there was no sound.”
― Chet Raymo, The Soul of the Night: An Astronomical Pilgrimage

“For many of us, that hole in our lives has been filled by a new story of the creation that does not require a God who intervenes in day-to-day affairs. It is an evolutionary story that reaches inward to embrace the ceaseless dance of DNA and outward to the spiraling galaxies, a story that places human life and consciousness squarely in a cosmic glow of complexifyingly energy…the universe is a unity, an interacting, evolving, and genetically related community of beings bound together in an inseparable relationship in space and time.”
― Chet Raymo, The Path: A One-Mile Walk Through the Universe

“To know if only half; to love is the other half.”
― Chet Raymo, The Soul of the Night: An Astronomical Pilgrimage

“Stephen Jay Gould once wrote that the human mind delights in finding pattern — so much so that we often mistake coincidence . . . for profound meaning.”
― Chet Raymo, The Virgin and the Mousetrap

“In one of his most popular essays, "The Colloid and the Crystal," the nature writer Joseph Wood Krutch wrote about these opposing forces in nature. "Order and obedience are the primary characteristics of that which is not alive," he wrote. "Life is rebellious and anarchical.”
― Chet Raymo, The Path: A One-Mile Walk Through the Universe

“To be mediocre is not to be small. . . . We are physically small compared to the galaxies, but our minds encompass the universe”
― Chet Raymo, The Virgin and the Mousetrap

“Yesterday on Boston Common I saw a young man on a skateboard collide with a child. The skateboarder was racing down the promenade and smashed into the child with full force. I saw this happen from a considerable distance. It happened without a sound. It happened in dead silence. The cry of the terrified child as she darted to avoid the skateboard and the scream of the child’s mother at the moment of impact were absorbed by the gray wool of the November day. The child’s body simply lifted up into the air and, in slow motion, as if in a dream, floated above the promenade, bounced twice like a rubber ball, and lay still. All of this happened in perfect silence. It was as if I were watching the tragedy through a telescope. It was as if the tragedy were happening on another planet. I have seen stars exploding in space, colossal, planet-shattering, distanced by light-years, framed in the cold glass of a telescope, utterly silent. It was like that. During the time the child was in the air, the spinning Earth carried her half a mile to the east. The motion of the Earth about the sun carried her back again forty miles westward. The drift of the solar system among the stars of the Milky Way bore her silently twenty miles toward the star Vega. The turning pinwheel of the Milky Way Galaxy carried her 300 miles in a great circle about the galactic center. After that huge flight through space she hit the ground and bounced like a rubber ball. She lifted up into the air and flew across the Galaxy and bounced on the pavement. It is a thin membrane that separates us from chaos. The child sent flying by the skateboarder bounced in slow motion and lay still. There was a long pause. Pigeons froze against the gray sky. Promenaders turned to stone. Traffic stopped on Beacon Street. The child’s body lay inert on the asphalt like a piece of crumpled newspaper. The mother’s cry was lost in the space between the stars. How are we to understand the silence of the universe? They say that certain meteorites, upon entering the Earth’s atmosphere, disintegrate with noticeable sound, but beyond the Earth’s skin of air the sky is silent. There are no voices in the burning bush of the Galaxy. The Milky Way flows across the dark shoals of the summer sky without an audible ripple. Stars blow themselves to smithereens; we hear nothing. Millions of solar systems are sucked into black holes at the centers of the galaxies; they fall like feathers. The universe fattens and swells in a Big Bang, a fireball of Creation exploding from a pinprick of infinite energy, the ultimate firecracker; there is no soundtrack. The membrane is ruptured, a child flies through the air, and the universe is silent.”
― Chet Raymo, The Soul of the Night: An Astronomical Pilgrimage

“There is a tendency for us to flee from the wild silence
and the wild dark, to pack up our gods and hunker
down behind city walls, to turn the gods into idols, to
lzowtow before them and approach their precincts only in
the official robes of office. And when we are in the temples,
then who will hear the voice crying in the wilderness?
Who will hear the reed shaken by the wind? Who
will watch the Galaxy rise above the eastern hedge and see
a river infinitely deep and crystal clear, a river flowing
from the spring that is Creation to the ocean that is Time?
We are dust flicked from the scorpion's tail. The woodcoclz
cries in ascending circles; the wild geese thrash the air
with their heavy wings. The night is the old wood; the
night is the native pool. Antares is a lamp, burning and
shining; rejoice in its light.”
― Chet Raymo, The Soul of the Night: An Astronomical Pilgrimage

“All of my life has been a relearning to pray- a letting go of incantational magic, petition, and the vain repetition “Me, Lord, Me,” instead watching attentively for the light that burns at the center of every star, every cell, every living creature, every human heart. Learning to pray, then, as I understand it, is learning to listen with the mind and heart- making oneself attentive to each exquisite detail of the world.”
― Chet Raymo, The Path: A One-Mile Walk Through the Universe

“Walt Whitman regarded the soul, how he spelled it out in his poem I Sing the Body Electric-
... Head, neck, hair, ears, drop and tympan of the ears, Eyes, eye-fringes, iris of the eye, eyebrows, and the waking and sleeping of the lids, Mouth, tongue, lips, teeth, roof of the mouth, jaws, and the jaw hinges ... The lung-sponges, the stomach-sac, the bowels sweet and clean ... The womb, the teats, nipples, breast-milk, tears, laughter, weeping, love-looks, love-perturbations and risings ... The thin red jellies within you or within me, the bones and the marrow in the bones ...
to merely dip into his exuberant parsings of the flesh. "Oh I say now these are the soul!" he enthuses.
Yes.”
― Chet Raymo, When God Is Gone, Everything Is Holy: The Making of a Religious Naturalist

“There is a tendency for us to flee from the wild silence
and the wild dark, to pack up our gods and hunker
down behind city walls, to turn the gods into idols, to
lzowtow before them and approach their precincts only in
the official robes of office. And when we are in the temples,
then who will hear the voice crying in the wilderness?
Who will hear the reed shaken by the wind? Who
will watch the Galaxy rise above the eastern hedge and see
a river infinitely deep and crystal clear, a river flowing
from the spring that is Creation to the ocean that is Time?
We are dust flicked from the scorpion's tail. The woodcock
cries in ascending circles; the wild geese thrash the air
with their heavy wings. The night is the old wood; the
night is the native pool. Antares is a lamp, burning and
shining; rejoice in its light.”
― Chet Raymo, The Soul of the Night: An Astronomical Pilgrimage

“So! the stars flow too. The broolz was lightyears
deep. Here beneath the bridge was another universe,
flowing in the dark water. Galaxies whirling in the stream
like the egg cases of caddis bugs. Nebulas of stars keeping
company with dragonfly nymphs. Mosquito larvae feeding
on the dust of novas.”
― Chet Raymo, Soul of Night : An Astronomical Pilgrimage

“There is a tendency for us to flee from the wild silence and the wild dark, to pack up our gods and hunker down behind city walls, to turn the gods into idols, to kowtow before them and approach their precincts only in the official robes of office. And when we are in the temples, then who will hear the voice crying in the wilderness? Who will hear the reed shaken by the wind? Who will watch the Galaxy rise above the eastern hedge and see a river infinitely deep and crystal clear, a river flowing from the spring that is Creation to the ocean that is Time? We are dust flicked from the scorpion's tail. The woodcock cries in ascending circles; the wild geese thrash the air with their heavy wings. The night is the old wood; the night is the native pool. Antares is a lamp, burning and shining; rejoice in its light.”
― Chet Raymo, The Soul of the Night: An Astronomical Pilgrimage

“Beryl . . . relieves stress. Diamond guards against envy. Azurite heightens dreams. Garnet improves self esteem. And good old white quartz is an energizer.”
― Chet Raymo, The Virgin and the Mousetrap