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Planet   /plˈænət/   Listen
Planet

noun
1.
(astronomy) any of the nine large celestial bodies in the solar system that revolve around the sun and shine by reflected light; Mercury, Venus, Earth, Mars, Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, Neptune, and Pluto in order of their proximity to the sun; viewed from the constellation Hercules, all the planets rotate around the sun in a counterclockwise direction.  Synonym: major planet.
2.
A person who follows or serves another.  Synonym: satellite.
3.
Any celestial body (other than comets or satellites) that revolves around a star.



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"Planet" Quotes from Famous Books



... remember, sir, but I think there is such a planet in one of the little new systems away out in one of the thinly worlded corners of the universe. I ...
— Captain Stormfield's Visit to Heaven • Mark Twain

... named like ourselves, spoke nearly the same tongue, lived on the same spots of earth, and therewithal were as different from us in manners, habits, ways of life and thought, as though they lived in another planet. The very face of the country has changed; not merely I mean in London and the great manufacturing centres, but through the country generally; there is no piece of English ground, except such places as Salisbury Plain, but bears witness to the amazing change which 400 ...
— Signs of Change • William Morris

... waited on his fortune, could have wish'd His dirty stirrup riveted through their noses, And follow'd after 's mule, like a bear in a ring; Would have prostituted their daughters to his lust; Made their first-born intelligencers; thought none happy But such as were born under his blest planet, And wore his livery: and do these lice drop off now? Well, never look to have the like again: He hath left a sort of flattering rogues behind him; Their doom must follow. Princes pay flatterers In their own money: flatterers dissemble their vices, And they dissemble their lies; that 's justice. ...
— The Duchess of Malfi • John Webster

... absurd that the universal crank-movement of an engine was ever the subject of a patent. Yet such was the case. A man named Pickard anticipated Watt, and the latter then applied to his engines the "sun-and-planet" movement, instead of the crank, until the patent on the latter expired. The steam-engine marks the beginning of a long series of troubles in the claims ...
— Steam Steel and Electricity • James W. Steele

... on Ayesha, who evidently was determined that I should drink this cup to the last drop, "that these dwellers in the sun, or the far planet where thou hast been according to thy tale, saw thee not and knew naught of thee? It may chance therefore that at this time thou wast not in their minds which at others dream of thee continually. Or it may chance that they never dream of thee at all, having quite forgotten thee, as the weaned cub ...
— She and Allan • H. Rider Haggard

... was almost like a life on another planet. Margaret was the younger, somewhat delicate daughter of a family of rather strident academics. Professor Hutchinson was not dependent on his salary to defray the expenses of his elegant establishment, but on his father, who had inherited from his ...
— Turn About Eleanor • Ethel M. Kelley

... not heard the poets tell How came the dainty Baby Bell Into this World of ours? The gates of heaven were left ajar: With folded hands and dreamy eyes, Wandering out of Paradise, She saw this planet like a star Hung in the glistening depths of even,— Its bridges, running to and fro, O'er which the white-winged angels go, Bearing the holy dead to heaven. She touched a bridge of flowers—those feet So light they did not bend the bells Of the celestial asphodels, They ...
— Character Sketches of Romance, Fiction and the Drama, Vol 1 - A Revised American Edition of the Reader's Handbook • The Rev. E. Cobham Brewer, LL.D.

... what sort of novels men and women will read, I do not know. What the income of each family will be I cannot tell you, any more than I can tell you whether there will be any intercommunication between the inhabitants of this planet and of Mars; whether there will be an ambassador from Mars ...
— The Common Sense of Socialism - A Series of Letters Addressed to Jonathan Edwards, of Pittsburg • John Spargo

... red planet Mars" was in the ascendant. The ugly Eastern Trouble, which finally culminated in the Crimean War, began to loom in the horizon, and England to stir herself ominously with military preparations. Drilling and mustering and mock ...
— Queen Victoria, her girlhood and womanhood • Grace Greenwood

... round moon of the tropics was sweeping over a sky of cloudless blue. The stars were eclipsed and scarcely visible, except a few of the larger ones, as the belt of Orion, the planet Venus, and the luminous radii of the ...
— The Rifle Rangers • Captain Mayne Reid

... Terra in the year 2500, a group of scientists make a last-minute getaway under fire and take off for another planet in another solar system. Their adventures make top-flight ...
— Rebel Spurs • Andre Norton

... begin to pull each other's hair, no doubt . . . for even that sometimes happens behind the stage between the best of friends and actors. From what planet have you dropped down that these people surprise you so greatly? . ...
— The Comedienne • Wladyslaw Reymont

... with a great desire to emphasize the freedom of the individual, built a half dozen separate houses, one for himself, one for his wife, one for his daughter Juanita, several for guests from all over the world who were always visiting him, and a little chapel. Literary men from every nation on the planet visited Miller at "The Heights." Most people interested knew also that Miller, with his own hands, had built monuments of stone to Fremont, the explorer, to Moses, and to Browning. There was also a granite funeral pyre for himself, ...
— Giant Hours With Poet Preachers • William L. Stidger

... by porcine monads, crystallizes into a pig; another, hurried along by heroic monads, becomes a lion or an Alexander. Now it is quite clear," continued Kenelm, shifting his position and crossing the right leg over the left, "that a monad intended or fitted for some other planet may, on its way to that destination, be encountered by a current of other monads blowing earthward, and be caught up in the stream and whirled on, till, to the marring of its whole proper purpose and scene of action, it settles ...
— Kenelm Chillingly, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton

... traces in the rocks the clear record of the early beginnings of life on our planet, those first steps that have led through the succession of ever-developing forms of animal and plant life at last culminating in man and the world as we now see them, so does the anthropologist discover in the myths and ...
— The Unwritten Literature of the Hopi • Hattie Greene Lockett

... true in what you say," said the count, with that smile which made him so handsome; "I have descended from a planet called grief." ...
— The Count of Monte Cristo • Alexandre Dumas, Pere

... The heavens themselves, the planets, and this center, Observe degree, priority, and place, Insisture, course, proportion, season, form, Office and custom, in all line of order; And therefore is the glorious planet, Sol, In noble eminence enthroned and sphered Amidst the other; whose med'cinable eye Corrects the ill aspects of planets evil, And posts, like the commandments of a king, Sans check, to good and bad. But when the planets, In evil mixture, to disorder wander, What plagues and ...
— Tolstoy on Shakespeare - A Critical Essay on Shakespeare • Leo Tolstoy

... asked, of the things which no human eye has ever seen or even thought of? Are we to suppose that a new planet comes into existence for the first time when first it sails into the telescope of the astronomer, and that Science is wrong in inferring that it existed not only before that particular astronomer saw it, but before there were any astronomers or other human ...
— Philosophy and Religion - Six Lectures Delivered at Cambridge • Hastings Rashdall

... The ridiculous planet, wavering bat-like through space, on which it had been impossible for an innocent man to buy a suitable horse was a dream of the past, and he had the solid, sensible old earth under his feet once more. He mounted into the phaeton and drove off ...
— Buying a Horse • William Dean Howells

... "Most of the policies are sold off-planet, of course. It's a form of insurance for non-insurables. Spaceship crews, ...
— The Risk Profession • Donald Edwin Westlake

... explain these things," admitted the prince gravely, "and I dare say that you could prove that they do not exist, just as a man from another planet could show us to his own satisfaction that there are no such things ...
— Romance Island • Zona Gale

... am wonderfully pleased with the suddenness of your kind answer. It makes me hope you are coming towards us, and that you incline more and more to your old friends.... Here is one [Lord Bolingbroke] who was once a powerful planet, but has now (after long experience of all that comes of shining) learned to be content with returning to his first point without the thought or ambition of shining at all. Here is another [Edward, Earl of Oxford], who thinks one of the greatest glories ...
— Henry Esmond; The English Humourists; The Four Georges • William Makepeace Thackeray

... Trivulzio had boasted that the Moro would be his captive in less than a fortnight. "What do you say?" asked Lodovico of Almodoro, the astrologer, who had followed him into exile. But Almodoro shook his head. It was impossible; no planet foretold such a disaster; on the contrary, all the signs were propitious, and he spoke confidently of coming victory. "On Wednesday in Holy Week," continued the chronicler, "the betrayal of Judas began." ...
— Beatrice d'Este, Duchess of Milan, 1475-1497 • Julia Mary Cartwright

... than the legitimate business of less potent financiers. Beginning business life by peddling gingerbread on a railway train, he had developed such a genius for railway management as some men show for chess or for virtue; and his accumulating property had the momentum of a planet. ...
— Malbone - An Oldport Romance • Thomas Wentworth Higginson

... finished in the first one hundred days. Nor will it be finished in the first one thousand days. . . nor in the life of this administration, nor even perhaps in our lifetime on this planet. But let ...
— Kennedy's Inaugural Address

... sleep, and men pull themselves together to new endeavor. The majority of great events in the world's history have taken place in the spring months. Is not the Ides of March written large in the story of this planet? ...
— The Vultures • Henry Seton Merriman

... was so calm and the scene so lovely that Mr. Huggins and myself stayed on deck till near midnight, when the ship was moored. During our walking to and fro a striking enlargement of the disk of Jupiter was observed, whenever the heated air of the funnel came between us and the planet. On passing away from the heated air, the flat dim disk would immediately shrink to a luminous point. The effect was one of visual persistence. The retinal image of the planet was set quivering in all azimuths ...
— Fragments of science, V. 1-2 • John Tyndall

... fairy tales; no man could soar away up yonder, like some blamed albatross or condor on metal wings or sails. And as for sending long dispatches from Buffalo clear down to Natchez, the same not being wired, if that's done here it's not the planet whereon I lived when mortals ran it; your stories make me tired. But what are these rip-snorting wagons? We must be in the land of dragons! I never saw the like! So riotously are they scooting, so wildly are they callyhooting they fairly burn ...
— Rippling Rhymes • Walt Mason

... at length within the very circle of Shakespeare's culminant and crowning constellation, bathing my whole soul and spirit for the last and (if I live long enough) as surely for the first of many thousand times in the splendours of the planet whose glory is the light of his very love itself, standing ...
— A Study of Shakespeare • Algernon Charles Swinburne

... satellite move? How is it related to the earth? Are the planets globes like that on which we live? How large are they, and how far off? What do we know of the satellites of Jupiter and of the rings of Saturn? How was Uranus discovered? What was the intellectual triumph which brought the planet Neptune to light? Then, as to the other bodies of our system, what are we to say of those mysterious objects, the comets? Can we discover the laws of their seemingly capricious movements? Do we know ...
— The Story of the Heavens • Robert Stawell Ball

... The gentle planet was in her final quarter, and upon her slender horn I hung my hopes of withdrawing from the ...
— Mardi: and A Voyage Thither, Vol. I (of 2) • Herman Melville

... the land, with all its mighty import; by the glittering freshness of the sward, and the abounding masses of flowers that furnished my sumptuous pathway; by the bracing and fragrant air that seemed to poise me in my saddle, and to lift me along as a planet appointed to ...
— Eothen • A. W. Kinglake

... number would have been 1: with one finger less than none at all on each hand, it would have been 0. But what does this mean? Here is a question for an algebraical paradoxer! So soon as we have found out how many fingers the inhabitants of any one planet have on each hand, we have the means of knowing their number of the Beast, and thence all about them. Very much struck with this hint of discovery, I turned my attention to the means of developing it. The first point was to clear my vision of all the old ...
— A Budget of Paradoxes, Volume II (of II) • Augustus de Morgan

... Daniel, first saw the light. I have cast no figure to ascertain which of the divinities presided at his birth, or what particular star first pencilled his pale blue eyes with its silver rays. But no angry planet was culminating in that particular chamber of the heavens at the time, for he grew up the best-natured being in those parts; and if the genius of Dulness was not actually present on the occasion, his court must have been held on that evening at no great ...
— Ups and Downs in the Life of a Distressed Gentleman • William L. Stone

... determination of angles. The angle at which a lighthouse is seen from your ship will give you much information that may be absolutely necessary for your safety. The angular altitude of the sun, star or planet does the same. The very heart of Navigation is based upon dealing with angles of all kinds. The instrument, therefore, that measures these angles is the most important of any used in Navigation and you must become thoroughly familiar with it. It is the sextant or some member of the ...
— Lectures in Navigation • Ernest Gallaudet Draper

... memory happened to throw back their gaze in that direction! Heaven be praised, I have forgotten everything; all the earthly trophies of skill or curious research; even the rolithes, that might possibly not be earthly, but presents from some superior planet. Nothing survives, except the humanities of the collection; and amongst these, two only I will molest the reader by noticing. One of the two was a mummy; the other was a skeleton. I, that had previously seen ...
— Memorials and Other Papers • Thomas de Quincey

... will have no other associations with the newly born moon than that poetic sentiment which delights in the vision of the faint sickle silver through the twilight; if they possess any further association with the planet, it is likely to be no more than a vague dread of the effect of its radiance falling on a sleeper. Women, on the contrary, will remember that the moon should be first seen not "full face," but "over the the[TN-1] right shoulder;" they will be aware that with such vision may be united a ...
— Current Superstitions - Collected from the Oral Tradition of English Speaking Folk • Various

... of crime than perhaps any people upon earth. If we can conceive what our own feelings would be, if, in the "development of the mammalia" some baser but more powerful race than man were to appear upon this planet, and we and our wives and children at our own happy firesides were degraded from our freedom, and became to them what the lower animals are to us, we can perhaps realize the feelings of ...
— Froude's Essays in Literature and History - With Introduction by Hilaire Belloc • James Froude

... say that even 'gainst that hallow'd season, At which our Saviour's birth is celebrated, The Bird of Dawning croweth all night long. The nights are wholesome, and no mildew falls; No planet strikes, nor spirits walk abroad: No fairy takes, nor witch hath power to charm, So gracious and so ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, No. 470 - Volume XVII, No. 470, Saturday, January 8, 1831 • Various

... But as when Fate one Eye deprives, That other strives to double which survives: So BEAUMONT dy'd: yet left in Legacy His Rules and Standard-wit (FLETCHER) to Thee. Still the same Planet, though not fill'd so soon, A Two-horn'd Crescent then, now one Full-moon. Joynt Love before, now Honour doth provoke; So th' old Twin-Giants forcing a huge Oake One slipp'd his footing, th' Other sees him fall, Grasp'd the whole Tree and single held ...
— The Works of Francis Beaumont and John Fletcher in Ten Volumes - Volume I. • Beaumont and Fletcher

... Bill, crooked, wrinkled, with his close-cropped white hair and little liquid diamond eyes, still nervously tearing his hat-brim, he looked almost grotesque. To Paul he seemed less a man than a creation of another planet, with unknown and incalculable instincts and impulses, who had come to earth and with foolish hand had wiped out the meaning of existence. Yet he felt no resentment, but rather a weary pity for the stranger blundering through an unsympathetic world. As soon as there came a pause in the ...
— The Fortunate Youth • William J. Locke

... insisted, that, nothing could demonstrate the turpitude of any system more surely than the fact, that MAN—made in the image of God—but a little lower than the angels—crowned with glory and honor, and set over the works of God's hands—his mind sweeping in an instant from planet to planet, from the sun of one system to the sun of another, even to the great centre sun of them all—contemplating the machinery of the universe "wheeling unshaken" in the awful and mysterious grandeur of its movements "through the void immense"—with a spirit ...
— The Anti-Slavery Examiner, Omnibus • American Anti-Slavery Society

... bolting through the Park and flying along the Riverside, had swerved. It was mounting the upper reaches of the longest highway on the planet. There it swerved again. From Broadway it barked loudly into a side-street where easily, with a soapy slide, ...
— The Paliser case • Edgar Saltus

... dates, and dynasties? What mere point they have occupied in the processes of the great universe! Their hieroglyphic pillars, their gray old pyramids;—what are they to the age of Uranus, or the new planet? Each of these empires fulfilled its mission, and relatively that mission was a great one; but in the long sweep of God's providence, and among the phenomena of absolute being, what a brief link, a subordinate climax, ...
— The Crown of Thorns - A Token for the Sorrowing • E. H. Chapin

... [98] turned adrift into the past, He finds no solace in his course; Like planet-stricken men of yore, He trembles, smitten to the core By ...
— The Poetical Works of William Wordsworth, Vol. II. • William Wordsworth

... work that may make known to the world the precious archaeological treasures that the regions of the so-called new world enclose, nearly unknown to the wise men of Europe, and even to those of America itself, and thus follow the perigrinations of the human race upon the planet that ...
— The Mayas, the Sources of Their History / Dr. Le Plongeon in Yucatan, His Account of Discoveries • Stephen Salisbury, Jr.

... he; "but such as they are, they show me the inevitable conditions of our planet. The snatcher, here below, is ubiquitous and eternal—as ubiquitous, as eternal, as the force of gravitation. He is likewise protean. Banish him—he takes half a minute to change his visible form, and returns au galop. Sometimes he's an ugly little cacophonous brown sparrow; ...
— The Cardinal's Snuff-Box • Henry Harland

... that's right good in him, He has a true soul for field, river, and wood in him; And his heart, in the midst of brick walls, or where'er it is, Glows, softens, and thrills with the tenderest charities, To you mortals that delve in this trade-ridden planet? No, to old Berkshire's hills, with their lime stone ...
— Selections From American Poetry • Various

... could he have so misunderstood her? He forgot all his anger in his admiration. She seemed to him to have undergone a complete change. There was an unearthly style of beauty around her—her eyes blazed and shone with the lurid light of a far-distant planet, while her wealth of raven hair fell in disordered masses on her shoulders. It was passion, real passion, that he beheld to-night, not that mere empty delusion which he had so long followed blindly. Marie was really capable ...
— The Champdoce Mystery • Emile Gaboriau

... your father has given them great power with the winds, according to their names. You are the youngest of his children. I have nourished you from your infancy, for your mother died in giving you birth, owing to the ill treatment of your father. I have no relations besides you this side of the planet in which I was born, and from which I was precipitated by female jealousy. Your mother was my only child, and you are my ...
— The Myth of Hiawatha, and Other Oral Legends, Mythologic and Allegoric, of the North American Indians • Henry R. Schoolcraft

... tell, sir. I desire good construction in fair sort. I never sustained the like disgrace, by heaven! Sure I was struck with a planet thence, for I had no ...
— English Literature For Boys And Girls • H.E. Marshall

... very impatient, had been looking up some time for the assistance which he expected would have come sooner; the round face of the farmer occasioned a partial eclipse of the round disc which bounded his view, just as one of the satellites of Jupiter sometimes obscures the face of the planet round ...
— Mr. Midshipman Easy • Captain Frederick Marryat

... did so she tore from her face the concealing mask and stood before him, Miss Lady indeed—tall, straight, young and beautiful. Eddring moved forward impetuously, feeling all the thrill of her presence; all the lambency of woman, planet-like, far-off, mysterious. Eagerly he looked, and questioningly, doubtingly, and then there came a quick content to his heart. In spite of all, in spite of what might have been, this was Miss Lady herself and none other! ...
— The Law of the Land • Emerson Hough

... world, an undiscovered country. Every learned person is a whole territory, a universe of new thought. Every one who does anything with a heart for it, every specialist every one, however simple, who is strenuous and genuine, is a "new discovery." Let us give credit to the smallest planet that is true ...
— Poems Every Child Should Know - The What-Every-Child-Should-Know-Library • Various

... discussed. The end once achieved, it is expected that mankind will have become one gigantic living entity, endowed with senses, nerves, heart, arteries, and all the organs necessary to operate and employ the forces and wealth of the planet. The process will be complex because the factors are numerous and of various orders, and for this reason few political thinkers have realized that its many phases are aspects of one phenomenon. That is also a partial explanation of the ...
— The Inside Story Of The Peace Conference • Emile Joseph Dillon

... when not carried too far, seems, perhaps, to suggest a truer view of the comparative importance of things; the American seems to say: "This matter is of importance to you and for me, but after all it does not concern the orbit of a planet and there is no use talking and acting as if it did." This sense of humour often saves the American in a situation in which the Englishman would have recourse to downright brutality; it unties the Gordian knot instead of cutting it. A too strong conviction of being in the ...
— The Land of Contrasts - A Briton's View of His American Kin • James Fullarton Muirhead

... Robert presented himself one day at the door of a fine old house belonging to the golden age of ante-bellum prosperity in Caroline County, he was received by two of the most English Englishmen to be found on this planet, in the persons of Mr. Edmund and Mr. Gregory Aglonby, brothers, bachelors, and joint-heirs of the property he had come to look at. These gentlemen received him with a dignity and antique courtesy irresistibly suggestive of bag-wigs, short swords, ...
— Lippincott's Magazine, September, 1885 • Various

... but only in the juvenile state, when they are not bigger than lobster's claws; and the pair that succeeds these is permanent, and has to last him for life—perhaps for centuries—for no one can tell how long the mighty elephant roams over this sublunary planet. When the tusks get broken—a not uncommon thing—he must remain toothless or "tuskless" for the rest of his life. Although the elephant may consider the loss of his huge tusks a great calamity, were he only a little wiser, he would break them off against the first tree. It would, in ...
— The Bush Boys - History and Adventures of a Cape Farmer and his Family • Captain Mayne Reid

... agreed in our discussion of this smoky furnace-colored sun, that, whatever the cause of the phenomenon, it was not a reflection of our sun, but a planet of some sort—a reality.(13) ...
— The Smoky God • Willis George Emerson

... flame rise from the uplifted chalice and disappear. It takes a beam of light one hundred and eight years to travel from Arcturus to the earth. Are we similar traveling beams, and is death merely our arrival on another planet which we illumine? Today I read aloud on the cliffs from the ...
— The Forgotten Threshold • Arthur Middleton

... the printing press that decided it: the greatest engine in the world, to which submarines and howitzers and airplanes are but wasteful toys. For when the printing presses are united the planet may buck and yaw, but she comes into line at last. A million inky cylinders, roaring in chorus, were telling him the truth. When his assistants found him, on his desk lay a half-ripped magazine where he had tried to tear ...
— Shandygaff • Christopher Morley

... been taught better than Mysie, some tings better than Gillian, but she has absolutely no interest in general knowledge, not even in the glaciers which she has seen; she does not know whether Homer wrote in Greek or Latin, considers "Marmion' a lesson, cannot tell a planet from a star, and neither knows nor cares anything about the two Napoleons. Now we seem to have breathed in such things. Why! I remember being made into Astyanax for a very unwilling Andromache (poor Eleanor) for caress, and being told to shudder at the bright copper coal-scuttle, before ...
— The Two Sides of the Shield • Charlotte M. Yonge

... Archimedes, long ago, Spoke out so grandly, 'Dos pou sto,— Give me a place to stand on, I'll move your planet for you, now,'— He little dreamed or fancied how The sto at last should find its pou For woman's faith to ...
— The Life of Harriet Beecher Stowe • Charles Edward Stowe

... papers afterward it was mechanically. Night, and the one great planet sinking in the West, appeared to appeal to him much more strongly than his books or the more than usually stirring ...
— The Mystery of the Hasty Arrow • Anna Katharine Green

... years before I matriculated at Oxford, Mr. Palmer, at that time M.P. for Bath, had accomplished two things, very hard to do on our little planet, the Earth, however cheap they may be held by eccentric people in comets: he had invented mail-coaches, and he had married the daughter of a duke. He was, therefore, just twice as great a man as Galileo, who did certainly invent (or, which is the same thing, [Footnote: "The ...
— The English Mail-Coach and Joan of Arc • Thomas de Quincey

... the contest for a free soil had already been sealed with blood. In those days, as one went to Pennsylvania to study coal formations, or to Lake Superior for copper, so one went to Kansas for men. "Every footpath on this planet," said a rare thinker, "may lead to the door of a hero," and that trail into Kansas ended rightly at the tent-door ...
— Oldport Days • Thomas Wentworth Higginson

... destroys the identity of the whole, let we must measure the greatness of the part, not absolutely, but by its proportion to the whole. The addition or diminution of a mountain would not be sufficient to produce a diversity in a planet: though the change of a very few inches would be able to destroy the identity of some bodies. It will be impossible to account for this, but by reflecting that objects operate upon the mind, and break or interrupt the continuity of ...
— A Treatise of Human Nature • David Hume

... continually augmented for a long time, now began to decrease gradually. I was approaching a planet which I had from the first seen directly before me. By degrees it grew larger and larger, when, penetrating the thick atmosphere which surrounded it, I plainly saw seas, mountains and dales ...
— Niels Klim's journey under the ground • Baron Ludvig Holberg

... supersensible regions[obs3]; varuna; vault of heaven, canopy of heaven; celestial spaces. heavenly bodies, stars, asteroids; nebulae; galaxy, milky way, galactic circle, via lactea[Lat], ame no kawa [Jap.]. sun, orb of day, Apollo[obs3], Phoebus; photosphere, chromosphere; solar system; planet, planetoid; comet; satellite, moon, orb of night, Diana, silver-footed queen; aerolite[obs3], meteor; planetary ring; falling star, shooting star; meteorite, uranolite[obs3]. constellation, zodiac, signs of the zodiac, Charles's wain, Big Dipper, Little Dipper, Great Bear, ...
— Roget's Thesaurus

... of primeval 'darkness upon the face of the waters' the resistless electric waves of the sun were beating upon the cloud-enwrapped surface of the planet. It was the formative period of elementary life, and the descendants and successors of that mighty host of living beings have to this day to lay the foundations of their being in similar conditions of darkness. Creative ...
— The Problems of Psychical Research - Experiments and Theories in the Realm of the Supernormal • Hereward Carrington

... siege of the land offices, the rush of the new population. Ah, well, of course, we're used to such scenes in the States. There's a great trek going on now in our own Southwest. But when that's over, our free land is done. Canada will have the handling of the last batch on this planet." ...
— Lady Merton, Colonist • Mrs. Humphry Ward

... Augusta! cease thy mourning, Happy days appear; God-like Albion is returning Loyal hearts to chear. Every grace his youth adorning, Glorious as the star of morning, Or the planet of the year. ...
— The Works Of John Dryden, Vol. 7 (of 18) - The Duke of Guise; Albion and Albanius; Don Sebastian • John Dryden

... code of the cabin is still to be rescued from the civilization of the cave-dwellers. The essence of politeness has been shown to be self-sacrifice in small things. The average American is naturally as unselfish a being as dwells upon the planet, but he often appears to disadvantage beside far meaner races by reason of an insane haste which tramples politeness under its feet. "After you, sir,"—a phrase which contains in a nutshell the very kernel ...
— Lippincott's Magazine, November 1885 • Various

... same time, observe the way of the Moon, Mars, Venus, Jupiter, and Saturn, amongst the fixt Stars, with a good large Telescope, and making little Iconismes, or pictures, of the small fixed Stars, that appear to each of them to lye in or near the way of the Center of the Planet, and the exact measure of the apparent Diameter; from the comparing of such Observations together, we might certainly know the true distance, or Parallax, of the Planet. And having any one true Parallax ...
— Micrographia • Robert Hooke

... letting the warm water riffle around his feet. Looking up at the green beacon of his home planet, he thought: I've left all that behind me. It was never really what I wanted. Mars is where I belong. With my friends, Tars Tarkas the great Green Jeddak, and Carter, the Warlord, and ...
— The Hills of Home • Alfred Coppel

... better hurry up, Oswald,' said Herbert Le Breton, 'for guides are the most tyrannical set of people on the entire face of this planet. I shall have another cup of coffee before I go, though, if the guides swear at me roundly in the best ...
— Philistia • Grant Allen

... is a grandeur in this view of life, with its several powers, having been originally breathed by the Creator into a few forms or into one; and that, whilst this planet has gone cycling on according to the fixed law of gravity, from so simple a beginning endless forms most beautiful and most wonderful have been, and are ...
— The Coming of Evolution - The Story of a Great Revolution in Science • John W. (John Wesley) Judd

... food and clothes! Nursling of adversity! 'Tis thy glory thus to be Sinking fund of raggery! Thus to scrape a nation's dishes, And fatten on a few good wishes! Or, on some venial treason bent, Frame thyself a government, For thy crest a brirnless hat, Poverty's aristocrat! Nonne habeam te tristem, Planet of the human system? Comet lank and melancholic —Orbit shocking parabolic— Seen for a little in the sky Of the world of sympathy— Seldom failing when predicted, Coming most when most restricted, ...
— What's Mine's Mine • George MacDonald

... might prove as well that a mushroom is to be preferred before a peach, because it shoots up in the compass of a night. A chariot may be driven round the pillar in less space than a large machine, because the bulk is not so great. Is the moon a more noble planet than Saturn, because she makes her revolution in less than thirty days, and he in little less than thirty years? Both their orbs are in proportion to their several magnitudes; and consequently the quickness ...
— Discourses on Satire and Epic Poetry • John Dryden

... everybody's business is intertwined with everybody else's, and there is nobody left with primitive brutality enough to hew a way through! And those of us that might lead a decent life on this ill-arranged planet are all crippled and hamstrung by what we call unselfishness." The doctor vigorously replenished his pipe. "I vow I will go to Greece next spring, ...
— The Testing of Diana Mallory • Mrs. Humphry Ward

... we had had about a month of it, and God knows where we were, but we had nobody to ask; and then we ran on a sandbar. The jungle met overhead. We were in what was only a dark drain through the forest. So this, I thought, is where we throw in our hand. We might as well have been in another planet for all the chance we had of getting away from that place. We were aground for two days; the river then rose a foot, and we came off. The men were complaining among themselves by then. I heard them talking to each other about chucking it. It was bound to come. This day ...
— London River • H. M. Tomlinson

... seaweed, the first-born of plants, produced the first atmosphere for living things to breathe at the time when the silt of the continents was beginning to emerge. What I see before my eyes, between the glass panes of my trough, tells me the story of the planet surrounding itself ...
— The Life of the Fly - With Which are Interspersed Some Chapters of Autobiography • J. Henri Fabre

... when brightest, as it appears in the west after sunset. Instead of moving towards the east among the stars, like the sun or the moon, we find, week after week, that Venus is drawing in towards the sun, until it is lost in the sunbeams. Then the planet emerges on the other side, not to be seen as an evening star, but as a morning star. In fact, it was plain that in some ways Venus accompanied the sun in its annual movement. Now it is found advancing in front of the sun to a certain limited ...
— Great Astronomers • R. S. Ball

... his ear on the earth. There it was! Far off, far off, the phantasmal stroke of hoofs, rapid, many, unswerving. It had come,—all that he had awaited,—fate, or something else. Low and clear in the distance one bugle blew blast of warning. When he rose, the great yellow planet, wheeling slowly down the giant cleft in the ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 13, No. 75, January, 1864 • Various

... semi-elected, semi-nominated body of a few score persons, controls the Planet. Transportation is Civilisation, our motto runs. Theoretically we do what we please, so long as we do not interfere with the traffic and all it implies. Practically, the A.B.C. confirms or annuls all international arrangements, and, to judge from its last report, finds our tolerant, ...
— A Diversity of Creatures • Rudyard Kipling

... knowledge or telescopic peep at the heavens. He feels himself called to understand and aid Nature, that she may, through his intelligence, be raised and interpreted; to be a student of, and servant to, the universe-spirit; and king of his planet, that, as an angelic minister he may bring it into conscious harmony with the law ...
— Woman in the Ninteenth Century - and Kindred Papers Relating to the Sphere, Condition - and Duties, of Woman. • Margaret Fuller Ossoli

... Locke and of Bacon, admits of easy demonstration, namely, that the air, the earth, and the waters teem with numberless myriads of creatures, which are as unknown and as unapproachable to the great mass of mankind, as are the inhabitants of another planet. It may, indeed, be questioned, whether, if the telescope could bring within the reach of our observation the living things that dwell in the worlds around us, life would be there displayed in forms more diversified, ...
— The Illustrated London Reading Book • Various

... singing out of tune, And hoarse with having little else to do, Excepting to wind up the sun and moon, Or curb a runaway young star or two, Or wild colt of a comet, which too soon Broke out of bounds o'er the ethereal blue, Splitting some planet with its playful tail, As boats are sometimes by a ...
— English Satires • Various

... cannot say that a thing does not exist till it is known to exist. The planet Neptune existed though, qua us, it did not exist before Adams and Leverrier discovered it, and we cannot hold that its continued non-existence to my laundress and her husband makes it any the less an entity. We cannot say that it did not exist at all till it was ...
— The Note-Books of Samuel Butler • Samuel Butler

... assumption does not extend to the actual, but only to the possible, existence of such things. I answer that, according to any test we have of possibility, they are not even possible. Their existence, so far as we can form any judgment, would seem to be inconsistent with the physical constitution of our planet at least, if not of the universe. To get rid of this difficulty, and at the same time to save the credit of the supposed system of necessary truth, it is customary to say that the points, lines, circles, and squares ...
— A System Of Logic, Ratiocinative And Inductive • John Stuart Mill

... repellent Life, perhaps, for Life is always that. Hatred, filth, love, battle, and death—all elemental things are here, undisguised; and if elemental things repel you, my lamb, then you have no business to be on this planet. Night, in the particular spots of the East to which these pages take you, shows you Life in the raw, stripped of its silken wrappings; and it is of passionate interest to those for whom humanity is the ...
— Nights in London • Thomas Burke

... concentrated upon these. "The violence of the fire then reached its zenith. Hitherto it had been a raging, searching fire; now it became a mad drumming, beyond all power of imagination. It is impossible to convey any idea of the savagery of this bombardment. Never has this old planet heard such an uproar. An officer who had witnessed during the summer the horrors of Arras, of Souchez, and of the Lorette Heights, told me that those were not in any way to be compared with the present, beyond all conception, appalling artillery onslaught. ...
— The Story of the Great War, Volume IV (of 8) • Francis J. (Francis Joseph) Reynolds, Allen L. (Allen Leon)

... said into the microphone, and the great men at the council tables strained to hear the translator's version through their headphones, "Gentlemen, I thank you for your prompt attention. I come as a Delegate from a great neighbor planet, in the interests of peace and progress for all the solar system. I come in the belief that peace is the responsibility of individuals, of nations, and now of worlds, and that each is dependent upon the other. I speak to you now through the electronic instrumentation which ...
— The Delegate from Venus • Henry Slesar

... history of our planet shows us first an incandescent nebula dispersed over vast infinitudes of space; later this condenses into a central sun surrounded by a family of glowing planets hardly yet consolidated from the plastic ...
— The Edinburgh Lectures on Mental Science • Thomas Troward

... through the labors of American astronomers, with all the accuracy that fifty years of observation might otherwise have been required to secure. Nor does Dr. Whewell allude to the fact, that Peirce alone has demonstrated the accuracy of Le Verrier's and Adams's computations, and shown that a planet in the place which they erroneously assigned to Neptune would produce the same perturbations of Uranus as those which Neptune produced. Much less does he allude to that wonderful demonstration by Peirce of the younger Bond's hypothesis, that the rings of Saturn are ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. II, No. 8, June 1858 • Various

... equilibrium is disturbed, where is the science oftentimes deep enough to rectify the unfathomable watch-work? Even the simplicities of planetary motions do not escape distortion: nor is it easy to be convinced that the distortion is in the eye which beholds, not in the object beheld. Let a planet be wheeling with heavenly science, upon arches of divine geometry: suddenly, to us, it shall appear unaccountably retrograde; flying when none pursues; and unweaving its own work. Let this planet in its utmost elongations travel out ...
— Theological Essays and Other Papers v1 • Thomas de Quincey

... Heron, have nothing to fear from me, you of all the world! In some quiet hour I will explain to you how my planet yearns to yours, and yours—that is, yourself—to mine. The gods have created us for each other, child; I am already under your influence, but your heart still hesitates, and I know why; it is because you ...
— Uarda • Georg Ebers

... "the bodies moving round the earth and in the heavens;" they had also memories of "the Drift Period," and of the outburst of Plutonic rocks. If man has existed on the earth as long as science asserts, he must have passed through many of the great catastrophes which are written upon the face of the planet; and it is very natural that in myths and legends he should preserve some recollection of events so ...
— The Antediluvian World • Ignatius Donnelly

... the difference of languages required a different mode of versification. The first strophe is eminently happy; in the second he has a little strayed from Pindar's meaning, who says, "If thou, my soul, wishest to speak of games, look not in the desert sky for a planet hotter than the sun; nor shall we tell of nobler games than those of Olympia." He is sometimes too paraphrastical. Pindar bestows upon Hiero an epithet which, in one word, signifies DELIGHTING IN HORSES; a word which, in the translation, ...
— Lives of the Poets: Gay, Thomson, Young, and Others • Samuel Johnson

... soothed by sweet porridge and warmth into that wide-gazing calm which makes us older human beings, with our inward turmoil, feel a certain awe in the presence of a little child, such as we feel before some quiet majesty or beauty in the earth or sky—before a steady glowing planet, or a full-flowered eglantine, or the bending trees over a silent pathway. The wide-open blue eyes looked up at Godfrey's without any uneasiness or sign of recognition: the child could make no visible audible claim on its father; ...
— Silas Marner - The Weaver of Raveloe • George Eliot

... because of mutual sacrifices in a common cause; by a knowledge that the long night of medieval tyranny had faded out and a new day had come, in which power shall arise from and be wielded by the peoples, never again by kings or emperors. And so our planet shall be ruled as long as man inhabits it. Out of bitter darkness, in the splendor of this new day the spirit of liberty has risen, with healing ...
— America's War for Humanity • Thomas Herbert Russell

... of the remotest nebulous spots and double stars, and then, gradually descending through the starry stratum to which our solar system belongs, it contemplates this terrestrial spheroid, surrounded by air and water, and finally, proceeds to the consideration of the form of our planet, its temperature and magnetic tension, and the fullness of organic vitality which is unfolded on its surface under the action of light. Partial insight into the relative dependence existing among all phenomena. Amid ...
— COSMOS: A Sketch of the Physical Description of the Universe, Vol. 1 • Alexander von Humboldt

... outdone by any other period of history, recorded or unrecorded." One hand in his pocket, an elbow on the mantel-shelf, Selwyn looked at David Guard. "In the quarter of a million years in which man, or what we term man, has presumably lived on this particular planet, nothing so far has been discovered, I believe, which tells of such abominations as are taking place to-day. It's an interesting epoch from the standpoint of ...
— People Like That • Kate Langley Bosher

... years, when Hetty looked back upon these weeks, they seemed to her, not like a dream, which is usually the heart's first choice of a phrase to describe the swift flight of a happy time, but like a few days spent on some other planet, where, for the interval, she had been changed into a sort of supernatural child. Except at night, they were never in the house. The harsh New England May laid aside for them all its treacheries, and was indeed the month of spring. Their mornings they spent on the water, rowing ...
— Hetty's Strange History • Helen Jackson

... as the great planet rolled towards the western hills. Friedrich fancied himself in Germany, far back in the long ago, when he was madly in love with Hilda. The story unfolded before him like a panorama of some one else's life. It was, indeed, he who had loved Hilda, but ...
— A Tar-Heel Baron • Mabell Shippie Clarke Pelton

... of shchikh. "Vat your Eart'men did not realize was dat dey cannot acclimate themselves as do we Venusians. You know de character of our planet made adaptability a condition of survival. It is true dat our atmosphere is heavy, but on top of our so-high mountains de air is t'in. We must live everywhere, de space is so few. I first adapted myself on Eart' to live. I was dere a whole year, you vill recollect. Den I go further. ...
— Show Business • William C. Boyd

... limits of the system have been widened by a thousand millions of miles, with the addition of one more giant planet and seven satellites to the ancient classes of its members, but a complexity has been given to its constitution baffling description or thought. Five hundred circulating planetary bodies bridge the gap between Jupiter and Mars, the complete investigation of the movements ...
— A Popular History of Astronomy During the Nineteenth Century - Fourth Edition • Agnes M. (Agnes Mary) Clerke

... was now seventy; but she is a woman whose personality is so compelling that she rouses none of the usual vulgar curiosity as to the number of years she may have lingered on this planet. You see Madame d'Haussonville as she is and take not the least interest in what she may have been during the years before you ...
— The Living Present • Gertrude Franklin Horn Atherton

... rocks," she sighed, "now and always. If I were made like your little luncheon friend, it might be different. I suppose I should spread my wings and settle down upon another planet. But I can't. I am differently made. I am not proud of it. I wish I weren't. It wouldn't all seem so hard then, I am still young, you know, really," she added, with a note of rebellion ...
— The Profiteers • E. Phillips Oppenheim

... another planet might have found it curious to notice, in contrast to this uniformity, that no two women dressed alike on these occasions, and no woman who could help it wore the same gown twice. Mrs. Brown and Mrs. Carew, to be sure, wore their "little ...
— The Rich Mrs. Burgoyne • Kathleen Norris

... worthy man's perch behind the luggage was made mine as far as Bellinzona, and we separated with reciprocal wishes for good weather on the morrow. To-morrow is so manifestly determined to be as fine as any other 30th of September since the weather became on this planet a topic of conversation that I have had nothing to do but stroll about Lucerne, staring, loafing and vaguely intent on regarding the fact that, whatever happens, my place is paid to Milan. I loafed into the immense new Hotel ...
— Italian Hours • Henry James

... of Europe, and hailed as the high priest of atheists; he is said to be the author of a shockingly blasphemous work called "The Bible of a People who acknowledge no God." He implored the ferocious Robespierre to honour the heavens by bestowing, on a new planet pretended to be discovered, his ci-devant Christian-name, Maximilian. In a letter of congratulation to Bonaparte, on the occasion of his present elevation, he also implored him to honour the God of the Christians by styling himself Jesus Christ the ...
— The Memoirs of Napoleon Bonaparte • Bourrienne, Constant, and Stewarton

... were empty, and the tall grey houses, narrow avenues, and the unaccustomed objects, presented a strange spectacle by the placid light of the moon. It appeared as if we had alighted in a different planet. Though fatigued and sleepy, the whole party would involuntarily stop to admire some novelty, and our march was straggling and irregular. One house refused us after another, and it soon became seriously a question whether the night was not to be passed in the open air. ...
— Recollections of Europe • J. Fenimore Cooper

... all the year covered with roses. There can be no difficulty in finding it, for it lies towards the Caspian, and is quoted in the Persian tales. Well, I open my Ephemerides, form my scheme under the suitable planet, and the genie obeys the ...
— The Journal of Sir Walter Scott - From the Original Manuscript at Abbotsford • Walter Scott

... neither Jew nor Greek, neither white nor black—only the sons and daughters of God, only the brothers and sisters of the one elder brother. There may be some who have learned to love all the people of their own planet, but have not yet learned to look with patience upon those of Saturn or Mercury; while others there must be, who, wherever there is a creature of God's making, love each in its capacity for love—from the arch-angel before God's throne, to the ...
— Warlock o' Glenwarlock • George MacDonald

... planets. These had a curious history. The planets were of course divine and living bodies, so much Plato gave us. Then come arguments and questions scattered through the Stoic and eclectic literature. Is it the planet itself that is divine, or is the planet under the guidance of a divine spirit? The latter seems to win the day. Anthropomorphism has stolen back upon us: we can use the old language and speak simply of the planet Mercury ...
— Five Stages of Greek Religion • Gilbert Murray

... wonderful thing that a famous author like Mr. Murell should come here to write a book about our planet," he told me, very seriously, and added, as an afterthought: "Have you any idea where he intends staying while he is ...
— Four-Day Planet • Henry Beam Piper

... regulation moulds. His mother's influence is perceptible in an early taste for poetry. In his third year he learnt by heart 'Sir John Moore's Burial,' 'Nelson and the North,' Wordsworth's 'Address to the Winds,' and Lord F. L. Gower's translation of Schiller ('When Jove had encircled this planet with light') from hearing his brother's repetition. He especially delighted in this bit of Schiller and in 'Chevy Chase,' though he resisted Watts' hymns. In the next two or three years he learns a good deal of poetry, and on ...
— The Life of Sir James Fitzjames Stephen, Bart., K.C.S.I. - A Judge of the High Court of Justice • Sir Leslie Stephen

... than any who have as yet lived on this planet in being able to foresee, and in some measure estimate, the results of our wealth of labour as it may be possibly extended over and through the unborn. A few scholars of the past, like him who, writing to the close ...
— Hygeia, a City of Health • Benjamin Ward Richardson

... Boles thought, squinting at the gun with reflectively narrowed eyes, some eight years after Uncle William's death, the old war souvenir would quietly become a key factor in the solution of a colonial planet's problems. He ran a finger over the dull, roughened frame, bent closer to study the neatly lettered inscription: GUNDERLAND BATTLE TROPHY, ANNO 2172, SGT. WILLIAM G. BOLES. Then, catching a familiar series of clicking noises from the hall, he straightened ...
— Watch the Sky • James H. Schmitz

... cripple the use of his limbs? Would a mountain of gold add one iota to the power of your soul? And yet it is gold that men have labored for since the earth was made. Could they once understand its real limitations? What a different planet we ...
— The Ghost of Guir House • Charles Willing Beale

... your very first appearance on this planet. You were born from another as yet unknown to our astronomers. You are now"—he lowered his eyes to the sitter's ...
— Bunker Bean • Harry Leon Wilson

... first ship from Earth made a landing on Venus, there was much speculation about what might be found beneath the cloud layers obscuring that planet's surface from the eyes ...
— The Native Soil • Alan Edward Nourse

... world. You shall go with me into the dark caverns of the earth, and see how rocks and metals are made in nature's forging shop. You shall witness the operation of the subterranean forces which have altered the whole aspect of this planet, and thrown up the lofty mountains, and tossed out from the treasury below the varied wealth it held, making the world both beautiful and rich. And I will show you ancient creatures, more huge than whales, which once frolicked on the ...
— Holidays at the Grange or A Week's Delight - Games and Stories for Parlor and Fireside • Emily Mayer Higgins

... Tis all as plain as noon-day. Thus she spake,— "May this spot stand till Guido's dearest blood Be mingled with thy own!" The soldiers say, In the close battle, when my wrath is up, The dead man's blood flames on my vengeful brow Like a red planet; and when war is o'er, It shrinks into my brain, defiling all My better nature with its slaughterous lusts. Howe'er it be, it shaped my earliest thought, And it will shape ...
— Representative Plays by American Dramatists: 1856-1911: Francesca da Rimini • George Henry Boker

... and more perfected will require less and less of tendance, how do I know that they may not be ultimately made to carry, or may not in themselves evolve, conditions of self-supply, self-repair, and reproduction, and not only do all the mighty and subtle work possible on this planet better than we could do it, but with the immense advantage of banishing from the earth's atmosphere screaming consciousnesses which, in our comparatively clumsy race, make an intolerable noise and fuss to each other about every petty ant-like performance, ...
— Impressions of Theophrastus Such • George Eliot

... war; all decorated for conspicuous valor; all ready to follow me to the ends of the earth and die, if need be; all eager to share in an undertaking as yet unknown to them, but one that promises to be the most extraordinary adventure ever undertaken on this planet. ...
— The Flying Legion • George Allan England

... When had it itself lived a wake-a-day life on this planet in order to collect this fund of strange experiences? These were questions that my dreams themselves answered. He lived in the long ago, when the world was young, in that period that we call the Mid-Pleistocene. He fell from the trees but did not ...
— Before Adam • Jack London

... to the heights; I believe it in spite of all, but I do not argue about it, which is useless, for every one judges according to his own eyesight, and the general outlook at the present moment is ugly and poor. Besides, I do not need to be assured of the salvation of our planet and its inhabitants in order to believe in the necessity of the good and the beautiful; if our planet departs from this law it will perish; if its inhabitants discard it they will be destroyed. ...
— Famous Women: George Sand • Bertha Thomas



Words linked to "Planet" :   vesper, phosphorus, solar system, astronomy, heavenly body, daystar, evening star, celestial body, biosphere, uranology, follower, planetal, Hesperus, inferior planet, morning star, lucifer, gas giant



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