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The pursuit of perfection, then, is the pursuit of sweetness and light.
-Matthew Arnold
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Civilization has fallen out of touch with night. With lights, we drive the holiness and the beauty of night back to the forests and the seas; the little villages, the crossroads even, will have none of it. Are modern folk, perhaps, afraid of the night? Do they fear the vast serenity, the mystery of infinite space, the austerity of stars?
-Henry Beston
The Outermost House (1928)
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The light shines in the darkness and the darkness comprehended it not.
-Bible
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It's not necessary to blow out your neighbor's light to let your own shine.
-M. R. Dehaan
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Light is the first of painters. There is no object so foul that intense light will not make it beautiful.
-Ralph Waldo Emerson
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Give light, and the darkness will disappear of itself.
-Desiderius Erasmus
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You can't have a light without a dark to stick it in.
-Arlo Guthrie
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Moonlight is sculpture.
-Nathaniel Hawthorne
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As far as we can discern, the sole purpose of human existence is to kindle a light in the darkness of mere being.
-Carl Gustav Jung
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Light is the symbol of truth.
-James Russell Lowell
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We are told to let our light shine, and if it does, we won't need to tell anybody it does. Lighthouses don't fire cannons to call attention to their shining- they just shine.
-Dwight L. Moody
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I keep the subject of my inquiry constantly before me, and wait till the first dawning opens gradually, by little and little, into a full and clear light.
-Sir Isaac Newton
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If the world is to be understood, if we are to avoid such logical paradoxes when traveling at high speeds, there are some rules, commandments of Nature, that must be obeyed. Einstein codified these rules in the special theory of relativity. Light (reflected or emitted) from an object travels at the same velocity whether the object is moving or stationary: Thou shalt not add thy speed to the speed of light. Also, no material object may move faster than light: Thou shalt not travel at or beyond the speed of light. Nothing in physics prevents you from traveling as close to the speed of light as you like; 99.9 percent of the speed of light would be just fine. But no matter how hard you try, you can never gain that last decimal point. For the world to be logically consistent there must be a cosmic speed limit. Otherwise, you could get to any speed you wanted by adding velocities on a moving platform.
-Carl Sagan
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The film of evening light made the red earth lucent, so that its dimensions were deepened, so that a stone, a post, a building, had greater depth, and more solidity than in any daytime light; and these objects were curiously more individual- a post was more essentially a post, set off from the earth it stood in and the field of corn it stood out against. All plants were individuals, not the mass of crop; and the ragged willow tree was itself, standing free of all other willow trees. The earth contributed a light to the evening. The front of the gray, paintless house, facing the west, was luminous as the moon is. The gray dusty truck, in the yard before the door, stood out magically in this light, in the overdrawn perspective of a stereopticon.
-John Steinbeck
The Grapes of Wrath
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There are two kinds of light -- the glow that illumines, and the glare that obscures.
-James Thurber
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Beautiful light is born of darkness, so the faith that springs from conflict is often the strongest and the best.
-R. Turnbull
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Come into the light of things. Let nature be your teacher.
-William Wordsworth
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Books about Light
