"Fixed star" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... titles:—"Stella Maris" Star of the Sea,[1] which is one interpretation of her Jewish name, Miriam: but she is also "Stella Jacobi," the Star of Jacob; "Stella Matutina," the Morning Star; "Stella non Erratica," the Fixed Star. When, instead of the single star on her veil or mantle, she has the crown of twelve stars, the allusion is to the text of the Apocalypse already quoted, and the number of stars is in allusion to the ...
— Legends of the Madonna • Mrs. Jameson
... intellectual system; the great ideas of time, and space, and extension, and magnitude, and number, and motion, and power. How grand the conception of the ages on ages required for several of the secular equations of the solar system; of distances from which the light of a fixed star would not reach us in twenty millions of years, of magnitudes compared with which the earth is but a foot-ball; of starry hosts—suns like our own—numberless as the sands on the shore; of worlds and systems shooting through the infinite spaces, with a velocity compared with which the cannon-ball ...
— The Uses of Astronomy - An Oration Delivered at Albany on the 28th of July, 1856 • Edward Everett
... heaven's pestilence, Yet it is good, is it heaven's will as that is. Is that a good war, which against the emperor Thou wagest with the emperor's own army? O God of heaven! what a change is this. Beseems it me to offer such persuasion To thee, who like the fixed star of the pole Wert all I gazed at on life's trackless ocean? O! what a rent thou makest in my heart! The ingrained instinct of old reverence, The holy habit of obediency, Must I pluck life asunder from thy name? Nay, do not turn thy countenance upon me— It always was as a god looking ...
— The Works of Frederich Schiller in English • Frederich Schiller
... than he had been at any time covered by what was now a good and had once been a miraculous memory. His company had so long been his pride, his reliance, his solace, and almost his gospel that he had grown to think of it as a sort of fixed star, whose light perhaps might be exceeded by some larger and more pretentious luminary, but which would nevertheless shine steadily on, beyond the fear of ...
— White Ashes • Sidney R. Kennedy and Alden C. Noble
... star, Who preachest Freedom in all weathers, Thou hast got on thy coat of tar, And over that, a cloak of feathers, Thou art "fixed" none will deny, If there's a fixed star in the sky. ...
— The Anti-Slavery Harp • Various
... and its virtue was its extreme impassiveness; it seemed quite impersonal, the mere automatic action of justice, not revengeful, not seeking for death, but merely stating the case as it might be stated by some planet or remote fixed star. Then there was a short pause, while the prosecutor for the Crown laid down his notes. And the same slow, clear, impassive voice ...
— The Blotting Book • E. F. Benson
... supposing, because a star shows no such light, that it is without rotation. The parallax of the nearest star is only one second, the whole lenticular mass of light which surrounds our sun would therefore only subtend an angle of a single second at the nearest fixed star. Seeing its extreme faintness, therefore, the effulgence of the star would render it totally invisible, provided that it could traverse the vast immensity of intervening space, without feeling the influence of that extinction, which Struve has proved ...
— Outlines of a Mechanical Theory of Storms - Containing the True Law of Lunar Influence • T. Bassnett
... in a minute, sir," said Roger. He turned to the astrogation prism and made careful observations of Regulus, the fixed star always used in astrogation. He jotted several numbers down on a piece of paper, rechecked them against a table of relative values and handed the ...
— On the Trail of the Space Pirates • Carey Rockwell
... in another way, let us suppose the sun and his planets to be represented by a fleet of ships at sea, all included within a space about half a mile across; then, in order that there might be no shore relatively nearer than the nearest fixed star is to the sun, we should have to place our fleet in the middle of the Pacific Ocean, while the distance of the main shore of the starry universe would be so immense that the whole surface of the earth would be far too small to hold the ...
— Other Worlds - Their Nature, Possibilities and Habitability in the Light of the Latest Discoveries • Garrett P. Serviss
... orbits—Prof. S. W. Burnham, the distinguished young astronomer of the Dearborn Observatory, Chicago, having discovered eight hundred within the last eight years. This discovery implies stupendous motion; every fixed star is a sun like our own, and we can imagine these wheeling orbs to be surrounded by cool planets, the abode of life, as well as ours. If the orbit of a binary system lies edgewise toward us, then one star will hide the ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 288 - July 9, 1881 • Various
... Church-of-Englandism. To the dazzled eyes of all ordinary mortals, content to chew the cud of parish sermons, and swallow, Sunday after Sunday, the articles of common belief, he seemed an eccentric comet. But a better astronomy recognized him as a fixed star, for he was unmistakable by that fitting Few whose verdict is both ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 1, Issue 2, December, 1857 • Various
... helpless, alone, at his mercy; yet he was in her power! The duchess! We have, perchance, observed a star in the distant firmament. We have admired it. It is so far off. What can there be to make us shudder in a fixed star? Well, one day—one night, rather—it moves. We perceive a trembling gleam around it. The star which we imagined to be immovable is in motion. It is no longer a star, but a comet—the incendiary giant of the skies. The luminary ...
— The Man Who Laughs • Victor Hugo
... word to Professor Challis to begin a search for the unknown orb. The latter did begin the work of exploration, and presently saw the planet. But he failed to recognize it! There it was; but the observer passed it over as a fixed star. As for Leverrier, he sent his calculations to Dr. Galle, of Berlin; and that great observer began his search. On the night of the twenty-third of September, 1846, he not only saw but caught the far-off world. There it ...
— Notable Events of the Nineteenth Century - Great Deeds of Men and Nations and the Progress of the World • Various
... spirit of it so boundless, that in the judgment of his soul nothing mattered now. As he lay in reverie, he heard his servant talking: it was the tale of the Mahdi and British valour and hopeless fighting, and a red martyrdom set like a fixed star in a sunless sky. What did it matter—what did it all matter, in this grave tremendous quiet wherein his soul ...
— The Judgment House • Gilbert Parker
... two thousand more of them, and many of these had been resolved by his largest telescopes into clusters of stars. He believed that the farthest of these nebulae that he could see was at least three hundred thousand times as distant from us as the nearest fixed star. Yet that nearest star—so more recent studies prove—is so remote that its light, travelling one hundred and eighty thousand miles a second, requires three and one-half years to ...
— A History of Science, Volume 3(of 5) • Henry Smith Williams
... us, quite evidently; though that of the Dover is still a fixed star, sir," answered the lieutenant, chuckling a little at his own humour; "it seems no larger than it did when we first ...
— The Two Admirals • J. Fenimore Cooper
... bisects the milky way, and ran due east eighty chains, three links and a swivel, thence south fifteen paces and a half to a blue spot in the sky, thence proceeding west eighty chains, three links of sausage and a half to a fixed star, thence north across the lead to ...
— Remarks • Bill Nye
... first attempt to ascertain the parallax of a fixed star, and selected for this purpose Gamma Draconis, a bright star in the Head of the Dragon. This constellation passed near the zenith of London at the time that he made his observations, and was favourably situated, so as to avoid the effects ...
— The Astronomy of Milton's 'Paradise Lost' • Thomas Orchard
... have been greater if we had met them at the Canary Islands, and greater still at Honolulu or some spot in Tasmania. Imagine what it would be to meet them in one of the planets; but if the meeting were to take place in the furthest fixed star the delight would be almost too much for us. At that distance, Sidmouth would seem little further from London ...
— Fan • Henry Harford
... off as the sun. Let us ponder for a little on the vastness of these distances. We shall first express them in miles. Taking the sun's distance to be ninety-three million miles, then the distance of the nearest fixed star is about twenty millions of millions of miles—that is to say, we express this by putting down a 2 first, and then writing thirteen ciphers after it. It is, no doubt, easy to speak of such figures, but it is a very ...
— Young Folks' Library, Volume XI (of 20) - Wonders of Earth, Sea and Sky • Various
... the knowledge which had come to her through the rector, which made the whole work and service of her life seem all too little for her to give in return for this boon. As for Horace, her feeling for him was akin to worship. It was he who represented to her henceforth the ideal which, like a fixed star, should give light to her path, though so ...
— A Manifest Destiny • Julia Magruder |
