All we ever see of stars are their old photographs.

Staring at the stars was like staring backward in time, since some stars are so far away that their light takes millions of years just to reach us. That we see stars not as they look now, but as they were when dinosaurs roamed the earth. The whole concept just struck me as…amazing somehow.

Only when it is dark enough can we see the stars.

There must be darkness to see the stars.

The light of the stars travels millions of miles to reach the earth, but it cannot reach our hearts — so many millions of miles further off are we!

But I know, somehow, that only when it is dark enough can you see the stars.

A certain darkness is needed to see the stars.

"I trembled to think of a world without stars. No guide for the sailor to trust at see, no jewels to dazzle our sense of beauty [...] But all around the globe, the air is so dirty and the lights from the cities are so bright that for some people few stars can be seen anymore. A generation of children may grow up seeing a blank sky and asking, "Did there used to be stars there?

Looking at these stars suddenly dwarfed my own troubles and all the gravities of terrestrial life. I thought of their unfathomable distance, and the slow inevitable drift of their movements out of the unknown past into the unknown future.

The heavenly light you admire is fossil-light, it's the unfathomably distant past you gaze into, stars long extinct

What are we doing here? We're reaching for the stars.

Poets say science takes away from the beauty of the stars - mere globs of gas atoms. I, too, can see the stars on a desert night, and feel them. But do I see less or more?

How far away from the earth are those remotest of stars: they are beyond the reach of eye, or man's devices, or man's thought. What an absurdity is this motion (of spheres). He also argues for the extreme variability of the distance to the various heavenly bodies and states that situated "in thinnest aether, or in the most subtle fifth essence, or in vacuity - how shall the stars keep their places in the mighty swirl of these enormous spheres composed of a substance of which no one knows aught?

Don't look up to heaven, for what will you see in the sky, except stars, luminous but cold, wholly insensitive to pity?