Quotes about Space

The Life we have is very great.
The Life that we shall see
Surpasses it, we know, because
It is Infinity,
But when all Space has been beheld
And all Dominion shown
The smallest Human Heart's extent
Reduces it to none.

Once the stories are written down, the visible text becomes the primary mnemonic activator of the spoken stories – the inked traces left by the pen as it traverses the page replacing the earthly tracks left by the animals, and by one’s animal ancestors, as they moved across the land. The places themselves are no longer necessary to the remembrance of the stories, and often come to seem wholly incidental to the tales, the arbitrary backdrops for human events that might just as well have happened elsewhere. The transhuman, ecological determinants of the originally oral stories are no longer emphasized, and often are written out of the tales entirely. In this manner the stories and myths, as they lose their oral, performative character, forfeit as well their intimate links to the more-than-human earth. And the land itself, stripped of the particularizing stories that once sprouted from every cave and streambed and cluster of trees, begins to lose its multiplicitous power. The human senses, intercepted by the written word, are no longer gripped and fascinated by the expressive shapes and sounds of particular places. The spirits fall silent. Gradually the felt primacy of place is forgotten, superceded by a new, abstract notion of “space” as a homogenous and placeless void.

The singular magic of a place is evident from what happens there, from what befalls oneself or others when in its vicinity. The songs proper to a specific site will share a common style, a rhythm that matches the pulse of the place, attuned to the way things happen there – to the sharpness of the shadows or the rippling speech of water bubbling up from the ground. In traditional Ireland, a country person might journey to one distant spring in order to cure her insomnia, to another for strengthening her ailing eyesight, and to yet another to receive insight and protection from thieves. For each spring has its own powers, its own blessings, and its own curses. Different gods dwell in different places, and different demons. Each place has its own dynamism, its own patterns of movement, and these patterns engage the senses and relate them in particular ways, instilling particular moods and modes of awareness, so that unlettered, oral people will rightly say that each place has its own mind, its own personality, its own intelligence.

Psychologically time is seldom homogenous but rather is as full of shapes as space.

A black Hole in your dimensional space is another reality system whose co-ordiantes interface with those of the Earth. It is a locus of being for a collective identity, just as Earth is a locus of being for a collective Human identity. The collective or star referred to as Black Hole is neither dead nor gone. Its focus of consciousness is just temporarily redirected into other dimensional co-ordinates that preclude its appearance in your space/time continuum. The field your scientists interpret to be unoccupiable and inescapable is actually holding the star's place in space, the way you might put a "Reserved" sign on your airplane seat if you wanted to get off for a walk between legs of a flight. Because the collective identity of the star has taken a walk somewhere your consciousness cannot currently reach, instead of percieving its manifestation, you percieve it as a gap in your space/time continuum. Your scientists think of it as being sealed off behind its own event horizon. In fact it is Human perception that is sealed off behind their current consciousness horizon.

The space between your heart and mine
Is the space we fill with time

When I was young I spoke like a child
I saw with a child's eyes
And an open door was to a girl
Like the stars are to the sky
It's funny how the world lives up to
All your expectations
With adventures for the stout of heart
And the lure of the open spaces

There's two lanes running down this road
And whichever side you're on
Accounts for where you want to go
Or what you're running from
Back when darkness overtook me
On a blind man's curve

I relied upon the moon and Saint Christopher

The perception of this law of laws awakens in the mind a sentiment which we call the religious sentiment, and which makes our highest happiness.  Wonderful is its power to charm and to command.  It is a mountain air.  It is the embalmer of the world.  It is myrrh and storax, and chlorine and rosemary.  It makes the sky and the hills sublime, and the silent song of the stars is it.  By it, is the universe made safe and habitable, not by science or power.  Thought may work cold and intransitive in things, and find no end or unity; but the dawn of the sentiment of virtue on the heart, gives and is the assurance that Law is sovereign over all natures; and the worlds, time, space, eternity, do seem to break out into joy.

Contemplating the lace-like fabric of streams outspread over the mountains, we are reminded that everything is flowing - going somewhere, animals and so-called lifeless rocks as well as water.  Thus the snow flows fast or slow in grand beauty-making glaciers and avalanches; the air in majestic floods carrying minerals, plant leaves, seeds, spores, with streams of music and fragrance; water streams carrying rocks both in solution and in the form of mud particles, sand, pebbles, and boulders.  Rocks flow from volcanoes like water from springs, and animals flock together and flow in currents modified by stepping, leaping, gliding, flying, swimming, etc.  While the stars go streaming through space pulsed on and on forever like blood globules in Nature's warm heart.

To me every hour of the light and dark is a miracle,
Every cubic inch of space is a miracle,
Every square yard of the surface of the earth is spread with the same.

I love you in a place where there's no space or time
I love you for my life 'cause you're a friend of mine

What art offers is space - a certain breathing room for the spirit.

Space is the breath of art.

In the woods, we return to reason and faith.  There I feel nothing can befall me in life, - no disgrace, no calamity, (leaving me my eyes,) which nature cannot repair.  Standing on the bare ground, - my head bathed by the blithe air, and uplifted into infinite space, - all mean egotism vanishes.  I become a transparent eye-ball; I am nothing; I see all; the currents of the Universal Being circulate through me; I am part or particle of God.

In the fabric of space and in the nature of matter, as in a great work of art, there is, written small, the artist's signature.

There is sorrow in finitude. The Self is beyond time, space and objects. It is infinite and hence of the nature of absolute happiness.

We were talking about the space between us all
And the people who hide themselves behind a wall of illusion

Surely a man needs a closed place wherein he may strike root and, like the seed, become.  But also he needs the great Milky Way above him and the vast sea spaces, though neither stars nor ocean serve his daily needs.

Shakespeare possesses the power of subordinating nature for the purposes of expression, beyond all poets.  His imperial muse tosses the creation like a bauble from hand to hand, and uses it to embody any caprice of thought that is uppermost in his mind.  The remotest spaces of nature are visited, and the farthest sundered things are brought together, by subtle spiritual connection.  We are made aware that magnitude of material things is relative, and all objects shrink and expand to serve the passion of the poet.

On a long flight, after periods of crisis and many hours of fatigue, mind and body may become disunited until at times they seem completely different elements, as though the body were only a home with which the mind has been associated but by no means bound.  Consciousness grows independent of the ordinary senses.  You see without assistance from the eyes, over distances beyond the visual horizon.  There are moments when existence appears independent even of the mind.  The importance of physical desire and immediate surroundings is submerged in the apprehension of universal values.

For unmeasurable periods, I seem divorced from my body, as though I were an awareness spreading out through space, over the earth and into the heavens, unhampered by time or substance, free from the gravitation that binds to heavy human problems of the world.  My body requires no attention.  It's not hungry.  It's neither warm or cold.  It's resigned to being left undisturbed.  Why have I troubled to bring it here?  I might better have left it back at Long Island or St. Louis, while the weightless element that has lived within it flashes through the skies and views the planet.  This essential consciousness needs no body for its travels.  It needs no plane, no engine, no instruments, only the release from flesh which circumstances I've gone through make possible.

Then what am I - the body substance which I can see with my eyes and feel with my hands?  Or am I this realization, this greater understanding which dwells within it, yet expands through the universe outside; a part of all existence, powerless but without need for power; immersed in solitude, yet in contact with all creation?  There are moments when the two appear inseparable, and others when they could be cut apart by the merest flash of light.

While my hand is on the stick, my feet on the rudder, and my eyes on the compass, this consciousness, like a winged messenger, goes out to visit the waves below, testing the warmth of water, the speed of wind, the thickness of intervening clouds.  It goes north to the glacial coasts of Greenland, over the horizon to the edge of dawn, ahead to Ireland, England, and the continent of Europe, away through space to the moon and stars, always returning, unwillingly, to the mortal duty of seeing that the limbs and muscles have attended their routine while it was gone.

The great majority of us are required to live a life of constant, systematic duplicity.  Your health is bound to be affected if, day after day, you say the opposite of what you feel, if you grovel before what you dislike and rejoice at what brings you nothing but misfortune.  Our nervous system isn't just a fiction, it's a part of our physical body, and our soul exists in space and is inside us, like the teeth in our mouth.  It can't be forever violated with impunity.

Lying on the roof counting the stars that fill the sky
I wonder if
Someone in the heavens looking back down on me
I'll never know
So much space to believe

Look
Here are we
On this starry night staring into space
And I must say
I feel as small as dust
Lying down here
What point could there be troubling
Head down wondering what will become of me

Look
Here are we
On this starry night staring into space
And I must say
I feel as small as dust
Lying down here
What point could there be troubling?
Head down wondering what will
Become of me
Why concern we cannot see
But no reason to abandon it
Time is short but that's all right
Maybe I'll go in the middle of the night
Take your hands from your eyes, my love
Everything must end some time
Don't burn the day away

Time and Space are modes by which we think, and not conditions by which we live.

No me in between as I jump in the space of We.

Imagination gives the man the ability to poject himself through time and space and rise above all limitations.

The last sound on the worthless earth will be two human beings trying to launch a homemade spaceship and already quarreling about where they are going next.

Classical physics rests upon five basic assumptions about the fabric of reality:  reality, locality, causality, and determinism.  These assumptions were postulated to take place within a framework of an absolute fixed space and time.  It was also taken for granted that the mathematical descriptions of physical processes corresponded to the actual behavior of objective events.

            The assumption of reality refers to the idea that the physical world is objectively real.  That means it exists independently of whether anyone is observing it.  The moon is still there even if you aren’t looking at it.  Locality refers to the idea that the only way that objects can be influenced is through direct contact.  Unmediated action at a distance is prohibited, as this is uncomfortably close to the occult suggestion that invisible spirits can cause things to occur, and the occult concepts are anathema to science.

            Causality assumed that the arrow of time points in one direction, and thus that cause → effect sequences are absolutely fixed.  Continuity assumes that there are no discontinuous jumps in nature or in that the fabric of space and time is “smooth.”  Determinism assumes that, as Einstein once quipped, ‘God does not play dice with the universe,’ meaning that things progress in an orderly, predictable way.  We might not be smart enough or know enough to predict everything, but determinism says that in principle we can predict the future completely if we knew all the starting conditions and causal linkages.

Observe the space between your thoughts, then observe the observer.