Pole Star Quotes & Sayings

A traveller, lost on a desert plain, feels that the recognition of one star, the Pole star, is of itself a great acquisition. — Maria Mitchell

If I were asked to name, in one word, the pole star round which the mathematical firmament revolves, the central idea which pervades the whole corpus of mathematical doctrine, I should point to Continuity as contained in our notions of space, and say, it is this, it is this! — James Joseph Sylvester

My love of creativity is one of my constants, a pole star amid the many constellations of possibilities and personalities that make up all the people I could be. — Claudia Gray

Beautiful it is, and a gleam from the same eternal pole-star visible amid the destinies of men, that all talent, all intellect, is in the first plane moral. What a world were this otherwise! — Thomas Carlyle

They emblazoned the cotton with the words "California Republic." Above that they drew a star and what they intended to be the figure of a grizzly bear. Then they ran the flag up the pole. The Mexican Californians who had gathered around, suddenly foreigners in their own land, looked up, pondered it silently, and wondered why the Americans had chosen a pig as the symbol of their ascension to power. The — Daniel James Brown

Be not guided by the will-o'-the-wisp of policy, but by the pole-star of divine authority. — Charles Haddon Spurgeon

Prince Arulmozhivarmar is like that pole star. If young men like you follow his ideals, you will achieve your goal in life. — Sumeetha Manikandan

He who rules by moral force is like the pole star, which remains in place while all the lesser stars do homage to it. — Confucius

There is an of-quoted passage in Walden, in which Thoreau exhorts us to find our pole star and to follow it unwaveringly as would a sailor or a fugitive slave. It's a thrilling sentiment - one so obviously worthy of our aspirations. But even if you had the discipline to maintain the true course, the real problem, it has always seemed to me, is how to know in which part of the heavens your star resides — Amor Towles

If a night-moth were to concentrate its will on flying to a star or some equally unattainable object, it wouldn't succeed. Only, it wouldn't even try in the first place. A moth confines its search to what has sense and value for it, what it needs, what is indispensable to its life ... if I imagined that I wanted under all circumstances to get to the North Pole, then to achieve it I would have to desire it strongly enough that my whole being was ruled by it. But if I were to decide to will that the pastor should stop wearing his glasses, it would be useless. That would be making a game of it. — Hermann Hesse

The North Pole, but to someone looking from the equator, it appears to lie just at the horizon. From the difference in the apparent position of the North Star in Egypt and Greece, Aristotle even quoted an estimate that the distance — Stephen Hawking

Side note: Down here, you're either an Amundsen guy, a Shackleton guy, or a Scott guy. Amundsen was the first to reach the Pole, but he did it by feeding dogs to dogs, which makes Amundsen the Michael Vick of polar explorers: you can like him, but keep it to yourself, or you'll end up getting into arguments with a bunch of fanatics. Shackleton is the Charles Barkley of the bunch: he's a legend, all-star personality, but there's the asterisk that he never reached the Pole, i.e. won a championship. How this turned into a sports analogy, I don't know. Finally, there's Captain Scott, canonized for his failure, and to this day never fully embraced because he was terrible with people. He has my vote, you understand. — Maria Semple

Let a ruler base his government upon virtuous principles, and he will be like the pole-star, which remains steadfast in its place, while all the host of stars turn towards it — Confucius