First he will see the shadows best, next the reflections of men and other objects in the water, and then the objects themselves; then he will gaze upon the light of the moon and the stars and the spangled heaven; and he will see the sky and the stars by night better than the sun or the light of the sun by day? – Plato, The Republic, Book VII
The faults of a superior person are like the sun and moon. They have their faults, and everyone sees them; they change and everyone looks up to them – Confucius
If the Sun and Moon should ever doubt, they’d immediately go out – William Blake, Auguries of Innocence.
Don’t tell me the moon is shining; show me the glint of light on broken glass – Anton Chekhov in a letter to his brother dated to 1886.
Everyone is a moon, and has a dark side which he never shows to anybody – Mark Twain, The Refuge of the Derelicts published in Fables of Man.
Moonlight drowns out all but the brightest stars – J.R.R. Tolkien, The Lord of the Rings.
O, swear not by the moon, the inconstant moon, that monthly changes in her circled orb, lest that thy love prove likewise variable – William Shakespeare, Romeo and Juliet, Act II, Scene II.
No one, it has been said, will ever look at the Moon in the same way again. More significantly can one say that no one will ever look at the earth in the same way. Man had to free himself from earth to perceive both its diminutive place in a solar system – Anne Morrow Lindbergh, Earth Shine, 1969.
But why, some say, the moon? Why choose this as our goal? And they may well ask why climb the highest mountain? Why, 35 years ago, fly the Atlantic? […] We choose to go to the moon. We choose to go to the moon in this decade and do the other things, not because they are easy, but because they are hard, because that goal will serve to organize and measure the best of our energies and skills, because that challenge is one that we are willing to accept, one we are unwilling to postpone, and one which we intend to win – John F. Kennedy, speech at Rice University, Texas, on 12th September 1962.
We are not asking for the moon – Yasir Arafat (b. 1929), quoted in the Observer, February 7, 1982.
From the distance of the Moon you can put your thumb up and you can hide the Earth behind your thumb. Everything that you’ve ever known, your loved ones, your business, the problems of the Earth itself – all behind your thumb – Jim Lovell, Apollo 8 & 13 astronaut, interviewed in 2007 movie In the Shadow of the Moon.
Look not into the sun! Even the moon is too bright for your nocturnal eyes! – Attributed to the German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche (1844-1900).
Her antiquity in preceding and surviving succeeding tellurian generations: her nocturnal predominance: her satellitic dependence: her luminary reflection: her constancy under all her phases, rising and setting by her appointed times, waxing and waning: the forced invariability of her aspect: her indeterminate response to inaffirmative interrogation: her potency over effluent and refluent waters: her power to enamour, to mortify, to invest with beauty, to render insane, to incite to and aid delinquency: the tranquil inscrutability of her visage: the terribility of her isolated dominant resplendent propinquity: her omens of tempest and of calm: the stimulation of her light, her motion and her presence: the admonition of her craters, her arid seas, her silence: her splendour, when visible: her attraction, when invisible – James Joyce, Ulysses.