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Celestial   Listen
adjective
Celestial  adj.  
1.
Belonging to the aerial regions, or visible heavens. "The twelve celestial signs."
2.
Of or pertaining to the spiritual heaven; heavenly; divine. "Celestial spirits." "Celestial light,"
3.
Of, pertaining to, or characteristic of, the Chinese, or Celestial, Empire, of the Chinese people.
Celestial city, heaven; the heavenly Jerusalem.
Celestial empire, China; so called from the Chinese words, tien chan, Heavenly Dynasty, as being the kingdom ruled over by the dynasty appointed by heaven.






Collaborative International Dictionary of English 0.48








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"Celestial" Quotes from Famous Books



... old celestial cant, Confess'd his flame, and swore by Styx, Whate'er she would desire, to grant— But wise ...
— The Poems of Jonathan Swift, D.D., Volume I (of 2) • Jonathan Swift

... adjectives which are impartially used as substantives, adjectives, verbs, or adverbs. That is all. The earnest young chaplain at first gasps with horror at the flaming words, and would not be surprised if the heavens opened and celestial wrath descended on these poor sinners' heads. But he soon learns that these little adornments of the King's English mean less than nothing. For Tommy is a reverent person, he is not a blasphemer in reality; he is gentle, ...
— Sketches of the East Africa Campaign • Robert Valentine Dolbey

... evil is attributed. If a horse tire, he has been ridden by Guecubu. In an earthquake, Guecubu has given the world a shock; and the like in all things. The Ulmens, or subaltern deities of their celestial hierarchy, resemble the genii, and are supposed to have the charge of earthly things, and to form, in concert with the benevolent Meulen, a counterpoise to the prodigious power of the malignant Guecuba. These ulmens of the spiritual world are conceived to be of both sexes, who always continue ...
— A General History and Collection of Voyages and Travels, Vol. 5 • Robert Kerr

... "Having completed our celestial observations, we went over to the large island to make an attack upon its inhabitants, the bears, which have annoyed us very much of late, and were prowling about our camp all last night. We found that the part of the island frequented by the bears forms an almost impenetrable ...
— First Across the Continent • Noah Brooks

... come even on the altar-steps; it would not come from looking at the serene picture where the saint, writing in the rocky solitude, was being visited by faces with celestial peace in them. Romola was in the hard press of human difficulties, and that rocky solitude was too far off. She rose from her knees that she might hasten to her sick people in the courtyard, and by some immediate beneficent action, revive that sense of worth in life which ...
— Romola • George Eliot

... Celestial Virtues grant, that your Pleasures may meet with no Interruption; your Charms know no Decay; and ...
— Zadig - Or, The Book of Fate • Voltaire

... physics of the heavenly bodies, indeed, finds its best opportunities in unlooked-for disclosures; for it deals with transcendental conditions, and what is strange to terrestrial experience may serve admirably to expound what is normal in the skies. In celestial science especially, facts that appear subversive are often the most illuminative, and the prospect of its advance widens and brightens with each divagation enforced or permitted from the strait paths ...
— A Popular History of Astronomy During the Nineteenth Century - Fourth Edition • Agnes M. (Agnes Mary) Clerke

... Meantime the Christians, prophesying woe And final doom upon a wicked world, Hither and thither run, and with their dark Forebodings madden all the minds of men. To thee they point! To thee, the source of fire, Who has drawn down on them celestial flame. ...
— Nero • Stephen Phillips

... the young missionary had found himself surrounded by circumstances which were wonderfully in harmony with his celestial longings: some of his predecessors had been carried so far by religious zeal that the King of Siam had put several to death by torture and had forbidden any more missionaries to enter his dominions; but this, as we ...
— Celebrated Crimes, Complete • Alexandre Dumas, Pere

... Christian soul should pass from earth without once seeing an antique painted window, with the bright Italian sunshine glowing through it. There is no other such true symbol of the glories of the better world, where a celestial radiance will be inherent in all things and persons, and render each continually transparent to the sight of all." The atrium, with its marble floor of almost spotless beauty, its lofty columns and noble simplicity of architecture, represented my beau-ideal of a Christian temple. There ...
— Fair Italy, the Riviera and Monte Carlo • W. Cope Devereux

... fitted closely on his long bronze-gold hair; his slight, slender and graceful figure barely suggested its silken strength held in fine reserve—and all the time the great brown eyes, which looked as if they had seen celestial things, scanned the sky, saw the tall cedars of Lebanon, the flocks on the slopes across the valley, the scattered stone cottages, the fleecy clouds that faintly flecked the deep blue of the sky, the distant spire of a church. All these treasures of the Umbrian landscape were his. Well ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great, Volume 6 - Subtitle: Little Journeys to the Homes of Eminent Artists • Elbert Hubbard

... ever think of the wonderful protection, the marvellous precision in celestial mechanics that guard you as you travel ...
— Editorials from the Hearst Newspapers • Arthur Brisbane

... to say which the "Song Celestial" does not explain for itself. The Sanskrit original is written in the Anushtubh metre, which cannot be successfully reproduced for Western ears. I have therefore cast it into our flexible blank verse, changing into lyrical measures where ...
— The Bhagavad-Gita • Sir Edwin Arnold

... scores of beggars came to Rowallan, so far no saint or angel had appeared. Most of the beggars were too well known to cast off a disguise worn long and successfully and suddenly declare themselves to be celestial visitors. But now and then an unknown beggar came from nobody knew where, and disappeared again into the same silent country. These nameless ones kept the two children's faith and hope alive. Samuel was one of these. Fly had spied his likeness to the child ...
— The Weans at Rowallan • Kathleen Fitzpatrick

... well concealed from man, that dehumanised, inhuman world, which is a celestial naught; and the bowels of existence do not speak unto man, except ...
— Thus Spake Zarathustra - A Book for All and None • Friedrich Nietzsche

... it a good omen— It is as well to think so, now and then; 'T was an old custom of the Greek and Roman, And may become of great advantage when Folks are discouraged; and most surely no men Had greater need to nerve themselves again Than these, and so this rainbow look'd like hope— Quite a celestial kaleidoscope. ...
— Don Juan • Lord Byron

... human. Were he incapable of ideal joy and sorrow, he, too, were brute. It is through this delicacy of conscious relationship, it is through this openness to the finest impressions, that he can become an organ of supernal intelligence, that he is capable of social and celestial inspirations. High spiritual sensibility is the central condition of a noble and admirable life; it is the hinge on which turn and open to man the gates of his highest glory and purest peace. Yet for ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. XI., February, 1863, No. LXIV. • Various

... say that lords did not behave like common people, that the children were only planted at certain celestial conjunctions ascertained by learned astrologers; at another that one should abstain from begetting children on feast days, because it was a great undertaking; and he observed the feasts like a man who wished to enter into Paradise without consent. Sometimes he would pretend that if ...
— Droll Stories, Volume 1 • Honore de Balzac

... to Kruzenstern by the Governor of Kamtchatka, not to approach the coast of Chinese Tartary, lest the jealous suspicions of the Celestial Government should be aroused, prevented the explorer from further prosecuting the work of surveying; and once more passing the Kurile group, the Nadiejeda returned ...
— Celebrated Travels and Travellers - Part III. The Great Explorers of the Nineteenth Century • Jules Verne

... woman should lose any of that refinement and delicacy of spirit which, as a celestial halo, ever encircles the pure in heart. We contend not that she shall become noisy and dictatorial, and abjure the quiet graces of life. We claim not that she, any more than her brother, should engage in any vocation or appear in any situation to which her nature ...
— History of Woman Suffrage, Volume I • Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Susan B. Anthony, and Matilda Joslyn Gage

... her mountain-height Unfurled her standard to the air, She tore the azure robe of night, And set the stars of glory there. She mingled with its gorgeous dyes The milky baldric of the skies, And striped its pure, celestial white With streakings ...
— Familiar Quotations • John Bartlett

... are often seen, in the course of nature, rained by celestial influences on human creatures; and sometimes, in supernatural fashion, beauty, grace, and talent are united beyond measure in one single person, in a manner that to whatever such an one turns his attention, his every action is so divine, that, surpassing ...
— Lives of the Most Eminent Painters Sculptors and Architects - Vol. 04 (of 10), Filippino Lippi to Domenico Puligo • Giorgio Vasari

... a large yellow diamond in the center bearing a blue celestial globe with 27 white five-pointed stars (one for each state and the Federal District) arranged in the same pattern as the night sky over Brazil; the globe has a white equatorial band with the motto ORDEM E PROGRESSO (Order ...
— The 2008 CIA World Factbook • United States. Central Intelligence Agency.

... in the heavenly grace had grown To the selfsame measure as his own; Whose treasure on the celestial shore Could neither be ...
— Stories to Tell Children - Fifty-Four Stories With Some Suggestions For Telling • Sara Cone Bryant

... out of us; and now, though we may kill a flea without the smallest remorse, we at all events know that we are killing our cousin. No doubt it shocks the flea when the creature that an almighty Celestial Flea created expressly for the food of fleas, destroys the jumping lord of creation with his sharp and enormous thumbnail; but no flea will ever be so foolish as to preach that in slaying fleas Man is applying a method of Natural Selection which will finally ...
— Back to Methuselah • George Bernard Shaw

... Max Stirner is this parable. Light streams upon the struggling egoist as he toils to the summit of consciousness. Among the designs of nineteenth-century artists we can recall none so touching, so powerful, so modern as this picture. Martin was not equally successful in portraying celestial episodes, though his paradises are enormous panoramas replete with architectural beauties. His figures, as exemplified in Miltonic illustrations, are more conventional than Fuseli's and never naively original as are Blake's. Indeed, of Blake's ...
— Promenades of an Impressionist • James Huneker

... shell, away from our common routine, away from that small orbit of thought in which each of us moves day after day, and make us realize more fully, that there are other stars moving all around us in our little universe, that we all belong to one celestial system, or to one terrestrial commonwealth, and that, if we want to see real progress in that work with which we are more especially entrusted, the re-conquest of the Eastern world, we must work with one another, for one another, like members of one body, ...
— Chips from a German Workshop - Volume IV - Essays chiefly on the Science of Language • Max Muller

... brethren of the quill: With good roast beef his belly full, Grown lazy, foggy, fat, and dull, Deep sunk in plenty and delight, What poet e'er could take his flight? Or, stuff'd with phlegm up to the throat What poet e'er could sing a note? Nor Pegasus could bear the load Along the high celestial road; The steed, oppress'd, would break his To raise ...
— The Humourous Poetry of the English Language • James Parton

... than fifty years later—all that is great and bold, all that is a re-incarnation of the spirit of Antiquity, all that marks the culmination of Renaissance art, seems due to the impulse of Michael Angelo, and, through him, to the example of Signorelli. From the celestial horseman and bounding avenging angels of Raphael's Heliodorus, to the St. Sebastian of Sodoma, with exquisite limbs and head, rich with tendril-like locks, delicate against the brown Umbrian sunset; from the Madonna of Andrea ...
— Euphorion - Being Studies of the Antique and the Mediaeval in the - Renaissance - Vol. I • Vernon Lee

... Thames by London Bridge, what time St. Saviour's bells strike out their evening chime; Forth leaps the ompetuous cataract of sound, Dash'd into noise by countless echoes round. Pass on—it follows—all the jarring notes Blend in celestial harmony, that floats Above, below, around: the ravish'd ear Finds all the fault ...
— Notes and Queries, Number 16, February 16, 1850 • Various

... cannot Music raise and quell? When Jubal[4] struck the corded shell,[5] His list'ning brethren stood around, And, wond'ring, on their faces fell To worship that celestial sound, 20 Less than a god they thought there could not dwell Within the hollow of that shell That spoke so sweetly and so well. What passion cannot Music raise ...
— Selections from Five English Poets • Various

... who might direct his wand'ring flight To Paradise, the happy seat of man, His journey's end, and our beginning woe. But first he casts to change his proper shape, Which else might work him danger or delay: And now a stripling cherub he appears, Not of the prime, yet such as in his face Youth smiled celestial, and to every limb Suitable grace diffus'd, so well he feign'd: Under a coronet his flowing hair In curls on either cheek play'd; wings he wore Of many a colour'd plume sprinkled with gold, His habit fit for speed succinct, and held Before his ...
— Hazlitt on English Literature - An Introduction to the Appreciation of Literature • Jacob Zeitlin

... some manuscript receipt, lest she should convert her rich ingredients into unpalatable compounds; but without ever having read one book upon the subject of education, without ever having sought one conversation with an intelligent person upon it, she undertakes so to mingle the earthly and celestial elements of instruction for that child's soul that he shall be fitted to discharge all duties below, and to enjoy all blessings above." And again, "Influences imperceptible in childhood, work out ...
— A Domestic Problem • Abby Morton Diaz

... of the Ko-ji-ki and the Nihongi, stated in the briefest possible way. At first it appears that there were two classes of gods recognized: Celestial and Terrestrial; and the old Shinto rituals (norito) maintain this distinction. But it is a curious fact that the celestial gods of this mythology do not represent celestial forces; and that the gods who are really identified with celestial phenomena are classed as terrestrial gods,—having ...
— Japan: An Attempt at Interpretation • Lafcadio Hearn

... because there is no death; or rather, because the only Death that there is increases the number of persons in the poem by one. Sports of hunting and fishing there are, of course, none; and, although it is an heroic poem, the horse takes little part in the celestial war, is hardly known in hell, and is unheard of on earth until Adam beholds in vision the armed concourse of his corrupt descendants. Nevertheless, the general impression left by the poem is one of richness rather than poverty ...
— Milton • Sir Walter Alexander Raleigh

... story was given to me by Tomah Josephs, another by Mrs. W. Wallace Brown. In the latter Glooskap's canoe is a great ship, with all kinds of birds for sailors. In the Shawnee legend of the Celestial Sisters (Hiawatha Legends), a youth who goes to the sky must take with him one of every kind of bird. This indicates that the Glooskap voyage meant ...
— The Algonquin Legends of New England • Charles Godfrey Leland

... have a different law of nations regulating our intercourse with the Indian tribes on this continent; another between us and the woolly-headed nations of Africa; another with the Barbary powers; another with the flowery land, or Celestial empire." Then, reasoning on the rights of property, established by labor, by occupation, by compact, he maintains "that the right of exchange, barter—in other words, of commerce—necessarily follows; that a state of nature among men is a state of peace; the pursuit of happiness, man's natural ...
— Cotton is King and The Pro-Slavery Arguments • Various

... those meads where sometime she might haunt, Were strewn rich gifts, unknown to any Muse, Though Fancy's casket were unlock'd to choose. Ah, what a world of love was at her feet! So Hermes thought, and a celestial heat Burnt from his winged heels to either ear, That from a whiteness, as the lily clear, Blush'd into roses 'mid his golden hair, Fallen in jealous curls about his shoulders bare. From vale to vale, from wood to wood, he flew, Breathing upon the ...
— Lamia • John Keats

... show. She looked upon a wide valley, that gleamed with the windings of a river. She brightened the river, and dimmed in the houses and cottages the lights with which the opposite hill sparkled like a celestial map. Lovelily she did her work in the heavens, her poor mirror-work—all she was fit for now, affording fit room, atmosphere, and medium to young imaginations, unable yet to spread their wings in the ...
— Home Again • George MacDonald

... by Ruskin said was it; whatever you have, of it you more would get, and where you are, you would go from. You happy are only when something you get, and never that you yourself are.' But I think the Celestial was wrong there. When a man is self-conscious of illy-made garments, a mean domicile, a poor kind of half education, he is uncomfortable; he hasn't accomplished his evolution from the conscious, the self-conscious, to the unconscious. It was ...
— The Master-Knot of Human Fate • Ellis Meredith

... seraph by the throne In full glory stood. With eager hand He smote the golden harp-string, till a flood Of harmony on the celestial air Welled forth, unceasing. There with a great voice, He sang the "Holy, holy evermore, Lord God Almighty!" and the eternal courts Thrilled with the rapture, and the hierarchies, Angel, and rapt archangel, throbbed and burned With ...
— The Universal Reciter - 81 Choice Pieces of Rare Poetical Gems • Various

... us with his usual brotherly affection. I have begun to work. Felpham is a sweet place for study, because it is more spiritual than London. Heaven opens here on all sides her golden gates: her windows are not obstructed by vapours; voices of celestial inhabitants are more distinctly heard, and their forms more distinctly seen; and my cottage is also a shadow of their houses. My wife and sister are both well, courting ...
— Selected English Letters (XV - XIX Centuries) • Various

... we had one of the most lovely tableaux I ever beheld. It was the conception of Murillo, represented by Madame A——. Mademoiselle Antoinette arranged the tableau with her usual good taste, and the effect was enchanting. It was more like a vision of something spiritual and celestial than a representation of anything merely mortal; or rather it was woman as in my romantic days I have been apt to imagine her, approaching to the angelic nature. I have frequently admired Madame A——as a mere beautiful woman, when I have ...
— Baddeck and That Sort of Thing • Charles Dudley Warner

... belongs to them, allowing them to devote their efforts fearlessly to their own advancement, is the noble work to which the endeavors of the great nation which has risen up in the New World should be directed, just as the sun rises in the celestial dome to give light, heat, and life; to maintain the equilibrium and prevent the ...
— Latin America and the United States - Addresses by Elihu Root • Elihu Root

... master, from the frailty of human nature, was enamoured of his blooming skin. Like his other scholars, he would not admonish and correct him, but when he found him in a corner he would whisper in his ear:—"I am not, O celestial creature! so occupied with thee, that I am harboring in my mind a thought of myself. Were I to perceive an arrow coming right into it, I could not shut my eye from ...
— Persian Literature, Volume 2, Comprising The Shah Nameh, The - Rubaiyat, The Divan, and The Gulistan • Anonymous

... thing sunshine is?" she said then slowly. No need to ask of the storm with this celestial reassurance flooding the room. But after a few moments she got up and went to the window. The trees, battered and torn, were ruffling such leaves as were left them gallantly in the wind, the paths still ran yellow water, the roadway ...
— The Heart of Rachael • Kathleen Norris

... touching the summit, and this law, which has projected them into space and time, is nothing other than the very constancy of their original insufficiency. The alternations of generation and decay, the evolutions ever beginning over and over again, the infinite repetition of the cycles of celestial spheres—this all represents merely a certain fundamental deficit, in which materiality consists. Fill up this deficit: at once you suppress space and time, that is to say, the endlessly renewed oscillations around a stable equilibrium always aimed at, never reached. Things re-enter into each other. ...
— Creative Evolution • Henri Bergson

... was on their side. The saints vouchsafed their aid, and the offended Virgin, relenting, held before them her protecting shield. In the form of beasts and other shapes abominably and unutterably hideous, the brood of hell, howling in baffled fury, tore at the branches of the sylvan dwelling; but a celestial hand was ever interposed, and there was a viewless barrier which they might not pass. Marguerite became pregnant. Here was a double prize—two souls in one, mother and child. The fiends grew frantic, but all in vain. She stood undaunted ...
— Old Quebec - The Fortress of New France • Sir Gilbert Parker and Claude Glennon Bryan

... became suddenly wide open, fixed, round with a kind of celestial astonishment. This his old French heart stopped beating, and he fell to the foot of the stair. His companions thought that he must have been shot. ...
— Defenders of Democracy • The Militia of Mercy

... If I may call myself a member of that body, 'the people,' I would rather be an Englishman, however much displeased with dull Ministers and blundering Parliaments, than I would be a Chinese under the rule of the picked sages of the Celestial Empire. Happily, therefore, my dear Leonard, nations are governed by many things besides what is commonly called knowledge; and the greatest practical ministers, who, like Themistocles, have made small states great—and the most dominant ...
— Harper's New Monthly Magazine, Volume 2, No. 12, May, 1851. • Various

... Winter. "You might bore a hole in some perfectly innocent Celestial. But you won't be troubled. Wong Li Fu carries out his own plans, and at present he is congratulating himself on the possession of a valuable hostage. But, come along! How about a wrap for you, Miss Forbes? We'll create a ...
— Number Seventeen • Louis Tracy

... assurance of coming victory so certain that we may imagine the noble and brave pioneers of woman suffrage, the men and women who were the torch-bearers of our movement, gathering today in some far-off celestial sphere and singing together a glad paean of exultation." Mrs. Catt referred to the granting of full suffrage and eligibility to women by ...
— The History of Woman Suffrage, Volume VI • Various

... had fallen on her since then (and some hours had been dark indeed), it had cheered and comforted her to think of the last months of his life. It was, in truth, the long abiding in the land of Beulah, the valley and the shadow of death long past, and the towers and gates of the celestial city full in sight. ...
— The Orphans of Glen Elder • Margaret Murray Robertson

... God and keep His command- [1] ments,—to come and unite with The Mother Church in Boston. The true Christian Scientists will be welcomed, greeted as brethren endeavoring to walk with us hand in hand, as we journey to the celestial city. [5] ...
— Miscellaneous Writings, 1883-1896 • Mary Baker Eddy

... sorrow or danger, her innocent love and prayers had attended the absent darling. Not in vain, not in vain, does he live whose course is so befriended. Let us be thankful for our race, as we think of the love that blesses some of us. Surely it has something of Heaven in it, and angels celestial may rejoice in ...
— The Newcomes • William Makepeace Thackeray

... CELESTIAL OBJECT. An arc of a circle of longitude between the centre of that object and the ecliptic, and is north or ...
— The Sailor's Word-Book • William Henry Smyth

... and country was Rajahansa, whose armies were formidable with countless elephants and horses, whose glory was unsullied as the moon in a cloudless sky, or the plumage of the swan, and whose fame was sung even by celestial minstrels. Though a terror to his enemies, he was beloved by all his subjects, and especially by the learned and pious brahmans, who were continually employed in prayers and sacrifices to the gods, for the welfare of the king ...
— Hindoo Tales - Or, The Adventures of Ten Princes • Translated by P. W. Jacob

... ancient paintings especially those in the tombs of the kings of Thebes, the scarabaeus plays a most remarkable part, as an emblem of the creating first source of life, which passes from it to the embryo, through the intermediary of a celestial generator, who is intended to represent the Makrokosm or great Ideal Man, as the demiurgos. We find the idea of the Makrokosm or great Ideal Man, permeating those writings termed, the Books of Hermes Trismegistos, which have reached our day, and which, with some more recent matter, contain much ...
— Scarabs • Isaac Myer

... chaplain in the early morning, and felt his heart flutter up and up like a lark, up and up till it was lost in infinite space and brightness. Almost as happy were the hours when he sat beside the foreign painter who came over the mountains to paint the chapel, and under whose brush celestial faces grew out of the rough wall as if he had sown some magic seed which flowered while you watched it. With the appearing of every gold-rimmed face the boy felt he had won another friend, a friend who would come and bend above him at night, keeping ...
— The Hermit and the Wild Woman and Other Stories • Edith Wharton

... to repeat all that the bashful, though ardent, man of war said to Maraquita, or all that Maraquita said to the man of war; how, ignoring the celestial orbs and domestic economy, she launched out into a rhapsodical panegyric of Azinte; told how the poor slave had unburdened her heart to her about her handsome young husband and her darling little boy in the far off interior, from whom she had been rudely torn, and whom she never ...
— Black Ivory • R.M. Ballantyne

... it is the twelfth Imam of the race of Ali who is to appear. At the age of twelve he was lost in a cave, where he still lives, awaiting his time. According to the Sunnis, the Mehdy is to come from Heaven with 360 celestial spirits, to purify Islam and convert the world. He will be a perfect Caliph, and ...
— The Contemporary Review, January 1883 - Vol 43, No. 1 • Various

... the silence of the midnight air, Celestial voices swell in holy chorus That bears the ...
— The Mysteries of Udolpho • Ann Radcliffe

... This is the Celestial from Singapore on her return trip. I'll arrange with your captain in the morning... and,... I say... did you hear me ...
— Youth • Joseph Conrad

... is, Mr. Henley, that few of us ever come to realize that life itself is a dream; and when science recognizes that fact, many of the difficulties she now encounters will vanish. Let me repeat a few lines from the Song Celestial, ...
— The Ghost of Guir House • Charles Willing Beale

... never conceived a preacher as being anything else but a very supernatural and spiritual and celestial sort of person. Father Jansen didn't seem to be that kind of a man ...
— Walter Pieterse - A Story of Holland • Multatuli

... but also to pay the fees of the geomancers who must decide the site of the graves and an auspicious day for the funeral. In this one family, thirteen coffins were made and graves dug in accordance with the following plan: The four quarterings of the celestial sphere were borne in mind, respectively governed by the Azure Dragon, Red Bird, White Tiger, and Black Tortoise, these being identified with East, West, South, and North. The graves should face the south, with White Tiger on the ...
— The Fulfilment of a Dream of Pastor Hsi's - The Story of the Work in Hwochow • A. Mildred Cable

... the midst of her celestial contemplations, rises up the simple, poignant cry of human suffering: "Lord, for Thy great pain have ...
— The Cell of Self-Knowledge - Seven Early English Mystical Treaties • Various

... illustrate our constellation of States. When God launched the planets upon their celestial pathway, he bound them all by the resistless power of attraction to the central sun, around which they revolved in their appointed orbits. Each may be swept by storms, may be riven by lightnings, may be rocked by earthquakes, may be devastated by all the terrestrial forces and overwhelmed ...
— History of the Thirty-Ninth Congress of the United States • Wiliam H. Barnes

... the other priests expressed the opinion that he must have had, not a paroxysm, but a celestial vision, for human powers would not have enabled him to arouse himself so quickly and so vigorously as he ...
— The Rise of the Dutch Republic, 1555-1566 • John Lothrop Motley

... privation of cloud is indeed a graver loss than the world knows. Terrestrial scenery is much, but it is not all. Men go in search of it; but the celestial scenery journeys to them. It goes its way round the world. It has no nation, it costs no weariness, it knows no bonds. The terrestrial scenery—the tourist's—is a prisoner compared with this. The tourist's scenery moves indeed, but only like Wordsworth's ...
— Essays • Alice Meynell

... of a long corridor, down two steps and round a corner. It was a large room, looking on to the park from two windows and on to the stableyard from a third. There were shelves containing the twins' schoolbooks and storybooks, a terrestrial and a celestial globe, purchased many years ago for the instruction of their great-aunts, and besides other paraphernalia of learning, signs of more congenial occupations, such as bird-cages and a small aquarium, boxes of games, a big doll's house still in tenantable repair though seldom occupied, implements ...
— The Squire's Daughter - Being the First Book in the Chronicles of the Clintons • Archibald Marshall

... stalls have for the cresting the emblems of the Seven Virtues, viz. the four cardinal virtues of the Philosophers, and the three celestial virtues, or Graces of ...
— Scottish Cathedrals and Abbeys • Dugald Butler and Herbert Story

... of a pennoned crowd, Gently proud, Moved in armour, silvered in celestial forge, Great Saint George, Stands he in the crimson-woven air of fight Speared with light— Hell is harried by the holy ...
— Eyes of Youth - A Book of Verse by Padraic Colum, Shane Leslie, A.O. • Various

... upon my own life, and to diminish that which I turn upon the life of others; strengthen my will that it may become powerful to command the desires of the body and the waverings of the soul; give me a pious conscience entirely devoted to Thy celestial kingdom, that I may always belong to Thee, or after failing, may be able ...
— CELEBRATED CRIMES, COMPLETE - KARL-LUDWIG SAND—1819 • ALEXANDRE DUMAS, PERE

... must follow the divine order as prescribed by Jesus,—never, in any way, to trespass upon the rights of their neighbors, but to obey the celestial injunction, "Whatsoever ye would that men should do to you, do ye even ...
— Retrospection and Introspection • Mary Baker Eddy

... such as this, and still more fully to that which belongs to the plane next above it, the name of spiritual sight may reasonably be applied; and since the celestial world to which it opens our eyes lies all round us here and now, it is fit that our passing reference to it should be made under the heading of simple clairvoyance, though it may be necessary to allude to it again when ...
— Clairvoyance • Charles Webster Leadbeater

... libidinous, the people will be voluptuously effeminate. When the gods are perishable, man cannot have the grandeurs of his nature developed: when the shadow of death sits upon the highest of what man represents to himself as celestial, essential blight will sit for ever upon human aspirations. One thing only remains to be added on this subject: Why were not the ancients more profoundly afflicted by the treacherous gleams of mortality in their gods? How was it that they could forget, for a moment, a revelation so full of misery? ...
— Theological Essays and Other Papers v1 • Thomas de Quincey

... religious observance having in reality an astrological origin. Indeed, if we examine the Jewish sacrificial system as described in Numbers xxviii. and elsewhere, we shall find throughout a tacit reference to the motions or influences of the celestial bodies. There was the morning and evening sacrifice guided by the movements of the sun; the Sabbath offering, determined by the predominance of Saturn; the offering of the new moon, depending on the motions of ...
— Myths and Marvels of Astronomy • Richard A. Proctor

... ruined shrine, amid the wreckage of the shell-fire, the defeated sovereign appealed to the spirit of Mohammed Ahmed to help him in his sore distress. It was the last prayer ever offered over the Mahdi's grave. The celestial counsels seem to have been in accord with the dictates of common-sense, and at four o'clock the Khalifa, hearing that the Sirdar was already entering the city, and that the English cavalry were on the parade ...
— The River War • Winston S. Churchill

... land would yield its increase, the sower supplicated the friendly interposition of the heavenly powers; in the latter, after having laid up in storehouses the winter's supply of corn and wine, the reaper returned thanks to the celestial givers of all good things, and made merry with his friends in feasts. Nor at this season, when the sight of nature's decay dashes with a certain degree of sadness even the hilarity of the ingathering of crops did the pious ...
— Life of Schamyl - And Narrative of the Circassian War of Independence Against Russia • John Milton Mackie

... it? Statue trembling into life With the first rosy flush upon the skin? Or woman-angel, richer by lack of wings? I see her—where I know not; for I see Nought else: she filleth space, and eyes, and brain— God keep me!—in celestial nakedness. She leaneth forward, looking down in space, With large eyes full of longing, made intense By mingled fear of something yet unknown; Her arms thrown forward, circling half; her hands Half lifted, and half circling, ...
— The Poetical Works of George MacDonald in Two Volumes, Volume I • George MacDonald

... the curtains cast over the icy coldness of death a warm glow. The heavy eyelashes drooped softly on the pure cheek; the head was turned a little to one side, as if in natural steep, but there was diffused over every lineament of the face that high celestial expression, that mingling of rapture and repose, which showed it was no earthly or temporary sleep, but the long, sacred rest which "He ...
— Uncle Tom's Cabin • Harriet Beecher Stowe

... our Lord's prayer do comprehend such great and celestial things, that no heart is able to search them out. The fourth petition containeth the whole policy and economy, or the temporal and house-government, and all things necessary for this life. The fifth prayer striveth and fighteth against our own evil consciences, ...
— Selections from the Table Talk of Martin Luther • Martin Luther

... delicacy, however, she locks the secret of her passion in her own breast, and by her coyness and reserve keeps her lover for a long period in the agonies of suspense. The hero, being reduced to a proper state of desperation, is harassed by other difficulties. Either the celestial nature of the nymph is in the way of their union, or he doubts the legality of the match, or he fears his own unworthiness, or he is hampered by the angry jealousy of a previous wife. In short, doubts, obstacles, and delays make ...
— Sakoontala or The Lost Ring - An Indian Drama • Kalidasa

... to help some boy in this audience stand on his two feet and with clear brain, manly muscle, and moral courage fight and win the battle of life. How it would rejoice my soul if I could, with earnest appeal, throw about some mother's boy an armor of celestial atmosphere against which the arrows of evil would beat in vain, and fall harmless ...
— Wit, Humor, Reason, Rhetoric, Prose, Poetry and Story Woven into Eight Popular Lectures • George W. Bain

... and Waterloos draw the strings of the soul tighter and tighter, nearer and nearer to God's great concert pitch, where the discords fade from our lives and where the music divine and harmonies celestial come from the same old strings that had been sending ...
— The University of Hard Knocks • Ralph Parlette

... a perfect English summer evening—warm, but not sultry. As they walked their horses up the carriage way, the sun went down, and as if he had fallen like a live coal into some celestial magazine of colour and glow, straightway blazed up a slow explosion of crimson and green in a golden triumph—pure fire, the smoke and fuel gone, and the radiance alone left. And now Helen received the second ...
— Thomas Wingfold, Curate • George MacDonald

... submission; where 80 Papists were to be found, 300 Protestant barons might be counted. The example of Rodolph should be a warning to Matthias. He should take care that he did not lose the terrestrial, in attempting to make conquests for the celestial." As the Moravian States, instead of using their powers as mediators for the Emperor's advantage, finally adopted the cause of their co-religionists of Austria; as the Union in Germany came forward to afford them its most active support, and as Matthias ...
— The History of the Thirty Years' War • Friedrich Schiller, Translated by Rev. A. J. W. Morrison, M.A.

... the roar of a lion. Then on a sudden trumpets, cymbals, drums and horns were sounded. That noise grew to an uproar. And, standing on a huge car drawn by white horses, the slayer of Madhu and the son of Pandu blew their celestial trumpets. Krishna blew his horn called Panchajanya; the Despiser of Wealth blew his horn called the Gift of the Gods; he of dreadful deeds and wolfish entrails blew a great trumpet called Paundra; King Yudishthira, the son of Kunti, blew the Eternal Victory; Nakula ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Vol. 17, - No. 97, January, 1876 • Various

... is you have set Lysander on to vex me with mock praises; and your other lover Demetrius, who used almost to spurn me with his foot, have you not bid him call me Goddess, Nymph, rare, precious, and celestial? He would not speak thus to me, whom he hates, if you did not set him on to make a jest of me. Unkind Hermia, to join with men in scorning your poor friend. Have you forgot our school-day friendship? How often, Hermia, have we two, sitting on one cushion, both singing one song, with ...
— Tales from Shakespeare • Charles and Mary Lamb

... for hours in the organ-gallery, while I listened down below; hardly believing that such heavenly sounds could come from those small child-fingers; almost ready to fancy she had called down some celestial harmonist to aid her in playing. Since, as we used to say—but by some instinct never said now—Muriel was so fond of "talking ...
— John Halifax, Gentleman • Dinah Maria Mulock Craik

... them when they tell us he was the son of God, begotten by a ghost; and that an angel announced this in secret to his mother? If they lied in one genealogy, why are we to believe them in the other? If his natural genealogy be manufactured, which it certainly is, why are we not to suppose that his celestial genealogy is manufactured also, and that the whole is fabulous? Can any man of serious reflection hazard his future happiness upon the belief of a story naturally impossible, repugnant to every idea of decency, and related by persons already detected of falsehood? Is it not more safe that we ...
— The Writings Of Thomas Paine, Complete - With Index to Volumes I - IV • Thomas Paine

... stony-hearted boots across the lawn to Dora sitting on a garden-seat under a lilac tree, what a spectacle she was, upon that beautiful morning, among the butterflies, in a white chip bonnet and a dress of celestial blue! There was a young lady with her—comparatively stricken in years—almost twenty, I should say. Her name was Miss Mills. And Dora called her Julia. She was the bosom friend of Dora. Happy ...
— David Copperfield • Charles Dickens

... Mr. Wordsworth's theory, if he means anything more by it than an ingenious and poetical allegory. THAT at least is not a link in the chain let down from other worlds; 'the purple light of love' is not a dim reflection of the smiles of celestial bliss. It does not appear till the middle of life, and then seems like 'another morn risen on midday'. In this respect the soul comes into the world 'in utter nakedness'. Love waits for the ripening of the youthful blood. The sense ...
— Characters of Shakespeare's Plays • William Hazlitt

... The wave cerulean and the yellow shore; As, o'er those waves, a boat like light'ning flies, Slender, and frail in form, and small in size. —Frail though it be, 'tis manned by hearts as brave As e'er have tracked the pathless ocean's wave,— High o'er their heads celestial diamonds grace The jewelled robe of night, and Luna's face Divinely fair! O goddess of the night! Guide thou their bark, do thou their pathway light! —Like sea-bird rising on the ocean's foam, Or like the petrel on ...
— Philip Gilbert Hamerton • Philip Gilbert Hamerton et al

... received us with his usual brotherly affection. I have begun to work. Felpham is a sweet place for study, because it is more spiritual than London. Heaven opens here on all sides her golden gates; her windows are not obstructed by vapors; voices of celestial inhabitants are more distinctly heard, and their forms more distinctly seen; and my cottage is also a shadow of their houses. My wife and sister are both well, ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 13, No. 78, April, 1864 • Various

... In the spacious halls of the Hanlin Academy, which back against the flanking wall of the British Legation, are gathered in mighty piles the literature and labours of the premier scholars of the Celestial Empire. Here complete editions of Gargantuan compass; vast cyclopaedia copied by hand and running into thousands of volumes; essays dating from the time of dynasties now almost forgotten; woodblocks black with age crowded the endless unvarnished shelves. In an empire where ...
— Indiscreet Letters From Peking • B. L. Putman Weale

... which flames and brimstone had something to do. It was not, however, a reality to them. Neither the future nor the past was real to them; no spiritual existence was real; nothing, in fact, save the most stimulant sensation. Once upon a time, a man, looking towards the celestial city, saw "The reflection of the sun upon the city (for the city was of pure gold), so exceeding glorious that he could not as yet with open face behold it, save through an instrument made for that purpose;" but Mr. Thomas Broad and his hearers needed no smoked glass now to prevent ...
— The Revolution in Tanner's Lane • Mark Rutherford

... them apart again, and has them first into a room where was a man that could look no way but downwards, with a muck-rake in his hand. There stood also one over his head with a celestial crown in His hand, and proffered him that crown for his muck-rake, but the man did neither look up nor regard, but raked to himself the straws, the small sticks, and the ...
— Humanly Speaking • Samuel McChord Crothers

... and with thee grew, A rainbow of the loveliest hue Of three bright colours,[329] each divine, And fit for that celestial sign; For Freedom's hand had blended them, Like tints in ...
— The Works Of Lord Byron, Vol. 3 (of 7) • Lord Byron

... sensibility and romantic imagination. To understand him we must, moreover, know something of his life and country. For, as Balzac truly remarked, Chopin was less a musician than une ame qui se rend sensible. In short, his compositions are the "celestial echo of what he had felt, loved, and suffered"; they are his memoirs, his autobiography, which, like that of every poet, assumes the form of ...
— Frederick Chopin as a Man and Musician - Volume 1-2, Complete • Frederick Niecks

... That placid dame, The Moon's Celestial Highness; There's not a trace Upon her face Of diffidence or shyness: She borrows light That, through the night, Mankind may all acclaim her! And, truth to tell, She lights up well, So I, for ...
— Songs of a Savoyard • W. S. Gilbert

... but cattle and wild beasts also, to give themselves over to the gratification of their desires: she strikes down these creatures with fierce intolerable force and fetters their servile bodies in the embraces of lust. The other is a celestial power endued with lofty and generous passion: she cares for none save men, and of them but few; she neither stings nor lures her followers to foul deeds. Her love is neither wanton nor voluptuous, but serious and unadorned, and wins her lovers to the pursuit ...
— The Apologia and Florida of Apuleius of Madaura • Lucius Apuleius

... in the marble floor, and seemed to invite me to its embrace. Except the hot stream, two draughts in the cottage of the veiled woman, and the pools in the track of the wounded leopardess, I had not seen water since leaving home: it looked a thing celestial. I plunged in. ...
— Lilith • George MacDonald

... of Montcorbier for the high example he set to his fellow-men. Here, in effect says the worthy churchman, was a man who, having passed the flower of his life in squalor and all manner of ignobilities, still kept in a sense the whiteness of his soul and allowed the brightness of the celestial flame to burn, faintly indeed but unextinguished, on the altar of his heart. How many men, asks Dom Gregory, glowing with a pious gratification, how many men who in humility have dreamed that they might under serener stars and happier auspices do great ...
— If I Were King • Justin Huntly McCarthy

... of revelation; it was pre-eminently the celestial color blessed among heathen nations, and among the Hebrews it was the Jehovah color, the symbol of the revered God. Hence, it was the color ...
— Forty Centuries of Ink • David N. Carvalho

... might be were childish or childlike. They looked to signs in the sky, to thunder-storms and comets and shooting stars. Birds, winged messengers, as they thought them, between earth and heaven, were celestial indicators of the gods' commands. But omens and auguries were but the outward symbols, and the Romans, like all serious peoples, went to their own hearts for their real guidance. They had a unique religious peculiarity, to ...
— Caesar: A Sketch • James Anthony Froude

... sister's going," he said to his sons, "I would bid you drown her; and, if you did not do it, I would drown her myself." Joan submitted: there was no leaven of pride in her sublimation, and she did not suppose that her intercourse with celestial voices relieved her from the duty of obeying her parents. Attempts were made to distract her mind. A young man who had courted her was induced to say that he had a promise of marriage from her, and to claim the fulfilment of it. Joan ...
— A Popular History of France From The Earliest Times - Volume III. of VI. • Francois Pierre Guillaume Guizot

... of the preceding century was overwhelmingly mechanical, because at that time of all the natural sciences, mechanics, and indeed, only the mechanics of the celestial and terrestrial fixed bodies, the mechanics of gravity, in short, had reached any definite conclusions. Chemistry existed at first only in a childish, phlogistic form. Biology still lay in swaddling clothes; the organism of plants and animals ...
— Feuerbach: The roots of the socialist philosophy • Frederick Engels

... to step in a cab and follow his mother to the grave, where his stepfather refused to have her coffin opened. And St. George, fresh from his Alma Mater, had weighted the winged words of his story with allusions to the tears celestial of Thetis, shed for Achilles, and Creon's grief for Haemon, and the Unnatural Combat of Massinger's father and son; so that Chillingworth had said things in languages that are not dead (albeit a bit Elizabethan) and the composing room had ...
— Romance Island • Zona Gale

... army with their horses, their guns, bright swords and helmets of steel, a metal to them unknown; their weird and mysterious music—the whole formed to the Aztec populace an inexplicable wonder, combined with those foreigners who had arrived from the distant East, "revealing their celestial origin in their fair complexions." Many of the Aztec citizens betrayed keen hatred of the Tlascalans who marched with the Spaniards ...
— The Story of Extinct Civilizations of the West • Robert E. Anderson

... spikenard, thyme, hyssop, and decaying orchids. This quintessential medley was as the sonorous blasts of Berlioz, repugnant and exquisite; it swayed the soul of Baldur as the wind sways the flame. There were odours like winged dreams; odours as the plucked sounds of celestial harps; odours mystic and evil, corrupt and opulent; odours recalling the sweet, dense smell of chloroform; odours evil, angelic, and anonymous. They painted—painted by Satan!—upon his cerebellum more than music—music that merged ...
— Visionaries • James Huneker

... believing that, when his long life was over, the apostle of the Indians was welcomed to the celestial abodes by the prophets of ancient days and by those earliest apostles and evangelists who had drawn their inspiration from the immediate presence of the Saviour. They first had preached truth and salvation to the world. And Eliot, separated ...
— Grandfather's Chair • Nathaniel Hawthorne

... of Ra most free from admixture is that of the disk of the sun, sometimes figured between two hills at rising, sometimes between two wings, sometimes in the boat in which it floated on the celestial ocean across the sky. The winged disk has almost always two cobra serpents attached to it, and often two rams' horns; the meaning of the whole combination is that Ra protects and preserves, like the vulture brooding over its young, destroys like the cobra, and creates like the ram. This is seen ...
— The Religion of Ancient Egypt • W. M. Flinders Petrie

... religious faith is generally mere human credulity. I discovered that in my pitying contempt for those of differing belief I much resembled the Yankee who ridiculed a Chinaman for wearing a pig-tail. 'True,' the Celestial replied, 'we still wear the badge of our former slavery. But you emancipated Americans, do you not wear the badge of a present and much worse form of slavery in your domination by Tammany Hall, by your corrupt politicians, and your ...
— Carmen Ariza • Charles Francis Stocking

... illuminated on the principle that reason and persuasion alone are to be used in the training of the tender twig, this little occurrence afforded food for serious wonder and reflection. I doubted if the logic of the sages or the wooing of the celestial seraphim would have wrought with such convincing power on the mind and ...
— Cape Cod Folks • Sarah P. McLean Greene



Words linked to "Celestial" :   heaven, heavenly, celestial guidance, south celestial pole, supernal, celestial mechanics, celestial orbit, celestial longitude, celestial globe, celestial equator, celestial point, celestial hierarchy, celestial latitude, Celestial City, celestial navigation, celestial horizon, north celestial pole



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