“When all the complicated calculations prove false, when the philosophers themselves have nothing more to tell us, we may be forgiven for turning to the meaningless twitter of the birds or to the distant counterweight of the stars.”

― Marguerite Yourcenar, Memoirs of Hadrian

"So, in this simple look directed at the celestial vault, the Gnostics find themselves confronted

with the ultimate nature of reality: what is this matter which is by turns full and empty, dense and tenuous, luminous and dark, of which our sky is made? Is this dark shore, this tenebrous tissue, this interstitial shadow wherein the stars seem pricked like incandescent pores, constituted of matter or of space? Is the ‘real’ sky nothing but its light, these winking eyes on the ocean of night,or is it at one and the same time that which shines and that which does not, a fire flaming and dark by turns? Do its shores and its black abysses comprise a nothingness, an absence of light, or are they the concrete material which interposes itself between our earth and the distant fires which it obscures?"