From the sky one cannot touch the heart of the stone petrified with a desire to live after living a life of softness for long, one cannot get to touch the tenderness of a flower smiling despite being battered in turn by heat and frost.
So whoever God wants to guide - He expands his breast to [contain] Islam; and whoever He wants to misguide - He makes his breast tight and constricted as though he were climbing into the sky. Thus does God place defilement upon those who do not believe.
When the sun is overthrown, and when the stars fall, and when the hills are moved, and when the camels big with young are abandoned, and when the wild beasts are herded together, and when the seas rise, and when souls are reunited, and when the girl-child that was buried alive is asked: For what sin she was slain, and when the pages are laid open, and when the sky is torn away, and when hell is lighted, and when the Garden is brought nigh, (then) every soul will know what it hath made ready.
And that inverted Bowl they call the Sky, Whereunder crawling coop'd we live and die, Lift not your hands to it for help—for it As impotently moves as you or I.
Jean Paul (Richter), Flower, Fruit, and Thorn Pieces, Chapter II.
Sometimes gentle, sometimes capricious, sometimes awful, never the same for two moments together; almost human in its passions, almost spiritual in its tenderness, almost Divine in its infinity.
The moon has set In a bank of jet That fringes the Western sky, The pleiads seven Have sunk from heaven And the midnight hurries by; My hopes are flown And, alas! alone On my weary couch I lie.
Heaven's ebon vault, Studded with stars unutterably bright, Through which the moon's unclouded grandeur rolls, Seems like a canopy which love has spread To curtain her sleeping world.