Hoyt & Roberts, comps. Hoyt’s New Cyclopedia of Practical Quotations. 1922.
Sky (The)
And they were canopied by the blue sky,
So cloudless, clear, and purely beautiful,
That God alone was to be seen in Heaven.
Byron—The Dream. St. 4.
“Darkly, deeply, beautifully blue,”
As some one somewhere sings about the sky.
Byron—Don Juan. Canto IV. St. 110.
Arrestment, sudden really as a bolt out of the blue has hit strange victims.
Carlyle—French Revolution. Vol. III. P. 347.
The mountain at a given distance
In amber lies;
Approached, the amber flits a little,—
And that’s the skies!
Emily Dickinson—Poems. XIX. Second Series. (Ed. 1891).
How bravely Autumn paints upon the sky
The gorgeous fame of Summer which is fled!
Hood—Written in a Volume of Shakspeare.
Bolt from the blue.
Horace—Ode. I. 34.
The sky
is that beautiful old parchment
in which the sun
and the moon
keep their diary.
Alfred Kreymborg—Old Manuscript.
When it is evening, ye say it will be fair weather: for the sky is red.
Matthew. XVI. 2.
The planets in their station list’ning stood.
Milton—Paradise Lost. Bk. VII. L. 563.
And that inverted Bowl they call the Sky,
Whereunder crawling coop’d we live and die,
Lift not your hands to it for help—for it
As impotently moves as you or I.
Omar Khayyam—Rubaiyat. FitzGerald’s trans. St. 72.
From hyperborean skies,
Embodied dark, what clouds of vandals rise.
Pope—Dunciad. III. L. 85.
A sky full of silent suns.
Richter—Flower, Fruit, and Thorn Pieces. Ch. II.
Sometimes gentle, sometimes capricious, sometimes awful, never the same for two moments together; almost human in its passions, almost spiritual in its tenderness, almost Divine in its infinity.
Ruskin—The True and Beautiful. The Sky.
The moon has set
In a bank of jet
That fringes the Western sky,
The pleiads seven
Have sunk from heaven
And the midnight hurries by;
My hopes are flown
And, alas! alone
On my weary couch I lie.
Sappho—Fragment. J.S. Easby-Smith’s trans.
This majestical roof fretted with golden fire.
Hamlet. Act II. Sc. 2. L. 312.
Heaven’s ebon vault,
Studded with stars unutterably bright,
Through which the moon’s unclouded grandeur rolls,
Seems like a canopy which love has spread
To curtain her sleeping world.
Shelley—Queen Mab. Pt. IV.
Redeo ad illes qui aiunt: quid si cœlum ruat?
I go back to those who say: what if the heavens fall?
Terence—Heauton timoroumenos. IV. 3. 41.
Of evening tinct,
The purple-streaming Amethyst is thine.
Thomson—Seasons. Summer. L. 150.
Non alias cælo ceciderunt plura sereno.
Never till then so many thunderbolts from cloudless skies. (Bolt from the blue.)
Vergil—Georgics. I. 487.
Green calm below, blue quietness above.
Whittier—The Pennsylvania Pilgrim. St. 113.
The soft blue sky did never melt
Into his heart; he never felt
The witching of the soft blue sky!
Wordsworth—Peter Bell. Pt. I. St. 15.