"Pole star" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... been used first by Italian navigators in the thirteenth century, mounted on the compass card in the fourteenth. Latitude was determined with the aid of the astrolabe, a device for measuring the elevation of the pole star above the horizon. With maps and accurate sailing directions (portolani), seamen could lose sight of land and still feel confident of their whereabouts. Yet it undoubtedly took courage for the explorers of the fifteenth century to steer their frail sailing vessels either down the ...
— A Political and Social History of Modern Europe V.1. • Carlton J. H. Hayes
... was this man's pole star: he cared for himself, and for none besides. Self was his god; for to please himself was practically the chief end of his existence. He proposed to pull down his barns, and build a larger storehouse on the site, in order that he might be able to hoard his increasing ...
— The Parables of Our Lord • William Arnot
... few or no human friends, he falls back on the Father of the fatherless and the Helper of those who have no other help. He relies on faith instead of fortune. He will make prayer his main weapon, and the light of the Lord his guide, and duty his pole star. He will pursue a straight course, avoiding evil, trying to feel the hand of God upon him, and the watchful eyes of God over him. And he will make a brave fight of it day by day, doing his best, and leave a higher power to determine ...
— Men of the Bible; Some Lesser-Known Characters • George Milligan, J. G. Greenhough, Alfred Rowland, Walter F.
... Lion, which the earth covered, were hidden. I recognised the tortuous, tattered band of the Milky Way with Vega very bright between sun and earth; and Sirius and Orion shone splendid against the unfathomable blackness in the opposite quarter of the heavens. The Pole Star was overhead, and the Great Bear hung over the circle of the earth. And away beneath and beyond the shining corona of the sun were strange groupings of stars I had never seen in my life—notably a dagger-shaped group that I knew ...
— The Country of the Blind, And Other Stories • H. G. Wells
... In some cases the period may extend to thousands of years; for the distance which separates them is enormous, and, even when with a powerful telescope it is indicated only by a narrow dark line, amounts to hundreds of millions of miles. The Pole Star itself is double. Andromeda is triple, with perhaps a fourth dark and therefore invisible companion. These dark bodies have a special interest, since it is impossible not to ask ourselves whether some at any rate of them may not be inhabited. In [Greek: epsilon] Lyrae there are two, each again ...
— The Beauties of Nature - and the Wonders of the World We Live In • Sir John Lubbock
... glance escape * And Pole star draught of sleep upon him pour; And the Bier-daughters[FN236] wend in mourning dight, * I knew that morning ...
— The Book of the Thousand Nights and a Night, Volume 3 • Richard F. Burton
... ebbing and it hurried them through and out into the open sea, where they felt the lift of the mighty ocean swell. Over these slow undulations the sailboat plowed, heading toward the empty northern horizon, with the kindling Pole Star as a beacon. The sky was clear, the sea was gently roughened by the night breeze, the constellations grew bright and ...
— Rainbow's End • Rex Beach
... Sun, Moon, and planets on the spheroidal figure of the Earth. By this movement the poles of the Earth are made to describe a circular path in that part of the heavens to which they point; so that, after the lapse of many years, the star which is known as the Pole Star will not occupy the position indicated by its name, but will be situated at a considerable distance from the pole. These motions, Milton says, unless attributed to the Earth, must be ascribed to several spheres crossing and thwarting each other obliquely; but the Earth, ...
— The Astronomy of Milton's 'Paradise Lost' • Thomas Orchard
... more striking when we consider the fixed stars, because in their case the distances are so enormously greater. The pole star, for example, is so far off that light, travelling at the inconceivable speed above mentioned, takes a little more than fifty years to reach our eyes; and from that follows the strange but inevitable inference that we see the pole star not as and where it is at ...
— Clairvoyance • Charles Webster Leadbeater |
