Quotations about Night

Night time is really the best time to work. All the ideas are there to be yours because everyone else is asleep. ~Catherine O'Hara


There they stand, the innumerable stars, shining in order like a living hymn, written in light. ~N.P. Willis


I often think that the night is more alive and more richly colored than the day. ~Vincent Van Gogh


The night walked down the sky with the moon in her hand. ~Frederick L. Knowles


There are nights when the wolves are silent and only the moon howls. ~George Carlin, Brain Droppings, 1997


Most glorious night!
Thou wert not sent for slumber!
~Lord Byron, Childe Harold


Night is a world lit by itself. ~Antonio Porchia, Voces, 1943, translated from Spanish by W.S. Merwin


Night, the beloved. Night, when words fade and things come alive. When the destructive analysis of day is done, and all that is truly important becomes whole and sound again. When man reassembles his fragmentary self and grows with the calm of a tree. ~Antoine de Saint-Exupéry


By night, an atheist half believes in God. ~Edward Young, Night Thoughts


O radiant Dark! O darkly fostered ray!
Thou hast a joy too deep for shallow Day.
~George Eliot, The Spanish Gypsy


Moonlight is sculpture. ~Nathaniel Hawthorne


Metaphor for the night sky: A trillion asterisks and no explanations. ~Robert Brault, www.robertbrault.com


Research is the name given the crystal formed when the night's worry is added to the day's sweat. ~Martin H. Fischer


Twilight drops her curtain down, and pins it with a star. ~Lucy Maud Montgomery


Silently, one by one, in the infinite meadows of heaven,
Blossomed the lovely stars, the forget-me-nots of the angels.
~Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, Evangeline


What I take from my nights, I add to my days. ~Leon de Rotrou, "Vencelas," translated


Mine is the night, with all her stars. ~Edward Young


One summer night, out on a flat headland, all but surrounded by the waters of the bay, the horizons were remote and distant rims on the edge of space. Millions of stars blazed in darkness, and on the far shore a few lights burned in cottages. Otherwise there was no reminder of human life. My companion and I were alone with the stars: the misty river of the Milky Way flowing across the sky, the patterns of the constellations standing out bright and clear, a blazing planet low on the horizon. It occurred to me that if this were a sight that could be seen only once in a century, this little headland would be thronged with spectators. But it can be seen many scores of nights in any year, and so the lights burned in the cottages and the inhabitants probably gave not a thought to the beauty overhead; and because they could see it almost any night, perhaps they never will. ~Rachel Carson


If the Stars should appear one night in a thousand years, how would men believe and adore; and preserve for many generations the remembrance of the city of God which had been shown! But every night come out these envoys of beauty, and light the universe with their admonishing smile. ~Ralph Waldo Emerson


O wild and wondrous midnight,
There is a might in thee
To make the charmed body
Almost like spirit be,
And give it some faint glimpses
Of immortality.
~James Russell Lowell, Midnight


I cannot walk through the suburbs in the solitude of the night without thinking that the night pleases us because it suppresses idle details, just as our memory does. ~Jorge Luis Borges


There is something haunting in the light of the moon; it has all the dispassionateness of a disembodied soul, and something of its inconceivable mystery. ~Joseph Conrad


Nothing like a nighttime stroll to give you ideas. ~J.K. Rowling, "The Egg and The Eye," Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire, 2000, spoken by the character Mad-Eye Moody


Is there not
A tongue in every star that talks with man,
And wooes him to be wise? nor wooes in vain;
This dead of midnight is the noon of thought,
And wisdom mounts her zenith with the stars.
~Anna Letitia Barbauld, A Summer Evening's Meditation


Night is the blotting paper for many sorrows. ~Author Unknown


Learn to reverence night and to put away the vulgar fear of it, for, with the banishment of night from the experience of man, there vanishes as well a religious emotion, a poetic mood, which gives depth to the adventure of humanity. ~Henry Beston



When the moon, after covering herself with darkness as in sorrow, at last throws off the garments of her widowhood, she does not at once expose herself impudently to the public gaze; but for a time remains veiled in a transparent cloud, till she gradually acquires courage to endure the looks and admiration of beholders. ~Augustus William Hare and Julius Charles Hare, Guesses at Truth, by Two Brothers, 1827


In my age, as in my youth, night brings me many a deep remorse. I realize that from the cradle up I have been like the rest of the race - never quite sane in the night. ~Mark Twain


To me at least was never evening yet
But seemed far beautifuller than its day.
~Robert Browning, The Ring and the Book


For the happiest life, rigorously plan your days, leave your nights open to chance. ~Mignon McLaughlin, The Second Neurotic's Notebook, 1966


The day has eyes; the night has ears. ~David Fergusson


No sight is more provocative of awe than is the night sky. ~Llewelyn Powys, quoted in Highs by Alex J. Packer


Night is a dead monotonous period under a roof; but in the open world it passes lightly, with its stars and dews and perfumes, and the hours are marked by changes in the face of Nature. What seems a kind of temporal death to people choked between walls and curtains, is only a light and living slumber to the man who sleeps afield. ~Robert Louis Stevenson


Night's black Mantle covers all alike. ~Guillaume de Salluste Du Bartas


Some praise the Lord for Light,
The living spark;
I thank God for the Night
The healing dark.
~Robert William Service, "Weary"


Dawn seemed to follow midnight with indecent haste. ~J.K. Rowling


Night has become painful for me. It brings to light the regrets of the day. ~Grey Livingston


Look how the pale queen of the silent night
Doth cause the ocean to attend upon her....
~Charles Best, "A Sonnet of the Moon"


The stars are the street lights of eternity. ~Author Unknown


A man is a very small thing, and the night is very large and full of wonders. ~Edward Plunkett


How like a queen comes forth the lonely Moon
From the slow opening curtains of the clouds
Walking in beauty to her midnight throne!
~George Croly, Diana


To seek the breast of darkness and be suckled by the night. ~Paul Simon, "A Poem on the Underground Wall"


Fooey! The porchlight is burnt out, and I can't see whether it's dark outside or not. ~Dave Beard


How long the night seems to one kept awake by pain. ~Bernard Joseph Saurin, Blanche et Guiscard, translated


Whoever thinks of going to bed before twelve o'clock is a scoundrel. ~Samuel Johnson


It is one of life's bitterest truths that bedtime so often arrives just when things are really getting interesting. ~Lemony Snicket


Day hath put on his jacket, and around
His burning bosom buttoned it with stars.
~Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr., "Evening"


In the country the darkness of night is friendly and familiar, but in a city, with its blaze of lights, it is unnatural, hostile and menacing. It is like a monstrous vulture that hovers, biding its time. ~Somerset Maugham


Stars are the daisies that begem
The blue fields of the sky.
~D.M. Moir


Every sleepy boy and girl in every bed around the world can hear the stars up in the sky whispering a lullaby. ~Mary Chapin Carpenter


Press close, bare-bosomed Night! Press close, magnetic,
nourishing Night!
Night of south winds! Night of the large, few stars!
Still, nodding Night! Mad, naked, Summer Night!
~Walt Whitman


For the night shows stars and women in a better light. ~Lord Byron, Don Juan


And the night shall be filled with music,
And the cares that infest the day
Shall fold their tents like the Arabs
And as silently steal away.
~Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, The Day Is Done


Beware thoughts that come in the night. They aren't turned properly; they come in askew, free of sense and restriction, deriving from the most remote of sources. ~William Trogdon


Cherries of the night are riper
Than the cherries pluckt at noon...
In the cherry pluckt at night,
With the dew of summer swelling,
There's a juice of pure delight,
Cool, dark, sweet, divinely smelling...
~Robert Graves


By day each soul must walk within its shadow.
Only night can make us whole again...
~Nicholas Gordon, www.poemsforfree.com


How lovely are the portals of the night,
When stars come out to watch the daylight die.
~Thomas Cole, Twilight


The iron tongue of midnight hath told twelve.
Lovers, to bed; 'tis almost fairy time.
~William Shakespeare, A Midsummer Night's Dream


A house is never still in darkness to those who listen intently; there is a whispering in distant chambers, an unearthly hand presses the snib of the window, the latch rises. Ghosts were created when the first man awoke in the night. ~J.M. Barrie, Little Minister


'Tis midnight now. The bend and broken moon,
Batter'd and black, as from a thousand battles,
Hangs silent on the purple walls of Heaven.
~Joaquin Miller, Ina


We wake in the night, to stereophonic silence. ~Mignon McLaughlin, The Neurotic's Notebook, 1960


That orbed maiden, with white fire laden,
Whom mortals call the moon.
~Percy Bysshe Shelley, The Cloud


Day, like a weary pilgrim, had reached the western gate of heaven, and Evening stooped down to unloose the latchets of his sandal shoon. ~Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, Hyperion


Midnight! the outpost of advancing day!
The frontier town and citadel of night!
~Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, Two Rivers


Soon as midnight brought on the dusky hour
Friendliest to sleep and silence.
~John Milton, Paradise Lost


Thank Heaven, the sun has gone in, and I don't have to go out and enjoy it. ~Logan Pearsall Smith


The young moon has fed
Her exhausted horn
With the sunset's fire.
~Percy Bysshe Shelley


These blessed candles of the night. ~William Shakespeare, referring to stars, Merchant of Venice


With finger on her solemn lip,
Night hushed the shadowy earth.
~Margaret Deland


It seemed to be a necessary ritual that he should prepare himself for sleep by meditating under the solemnity of the night sky... a mysterious transaction between the infinity of the soul and the infinity of the universe. ~Victor Hugo