A star gazing, rocket riding, moon walking quote collection

The Moon is the first milestone on the road to the stars.

— Arthur C. Clarke

If God wanted man to become a spacefaring species, He would have given man a moon.

— attributed to Krafft Ehricke, who also often described the Moon as our “seventh continent.”

The Moon speaks Russian.

— TASS, the Soviet press agency. Headline of their account of the press reaction to Luna 9, the first spacecraft landed on the Moon, 6 February 1966

For when I look at the Moon I do not see a hostile, empty world. I see the radiant body where man has taken his first steps into a frontier that will never end.

— David R. Scott, Commander Apollo 15, National Geographic magazine, Volume 144, No 3, September 1973.

Ten years ago the Moon was an inspiration to poets and an opportunity for lovers. Ten years from now it will be just another airport.

— Emmanuel G. Mesthene

The surface of the Moon is not smooth, uniform, and precisely spherical as a great number of philosophers believe it to be, but is uneven, rough, and full of cavities and prominences, being not unlike the face of the Earth, relieved by chains of mountains and deep valleys.

— Galileo Galilei, Sidereus Nuncius, 1610.

It is the very error of the moon;
She comes more nearer earth than she was wont,
And makes men mad.

— Othello, in Shakespeare's Othello. Act 5, scene 2.

Not secondary to the sun, she gives us his blaze again,
Void of its flame, and sheds a softer day… .
In Heaven queen she is among the spheres;
She, mistress-like, makes all things to be pure.

— Henry David Thoreau, 'Night and Moonlight,' The Atlantic Monthly Magazine, November 1863. 

What good is the Moon? You can't buy it or sell it.

— Ivan F. Boesky, Wall Street broker convicted of insider trading

The Moon is a white strange world, great, white, soft-seeming globe in the night sky, and what she actually communicates to me across space I shall never fully know. But the Moon that pulls the tides, and the Moon that controls the menstrual periods of women, and the Moon that touches the lunatics, she is not the mere dead lump of the astronomist… . When we describe the Moon as dead, we are describing the deadness in ourselves. When we find space so hideously void, we are describing our own unbearable emptiness.

— D.H. Lawrence, Phoenix: The Posthumous Papers of D.H. Lawrence, pt. 4, 1930.