A crescent shape (/ˈkrɛsənt/, British English also {/ˈkrɛzənt/ is a symbol or emblem used to represent the lunar phase in the first quarter (the "sickle moon"), or by extension a symbol representing the Moon itself.

Quotes

You brighten the night sky in the broad firmament, and illuminate the darkness. The Anuna gods stand by with prayers and supplications at your rising. The sweet sight of your resplendent crescent, full of loveliness, brings joy to the great lady of the Ki-ur, mother Ninlil. ~ Ishme-Dagan

• O Nanna, your crescent moon is called "the crescent moon of the seventh day".
  • Anonymous, A hymn to Nanna (Nanna E), late 3rd millennium BCE, at The Electronic Text Corpus of Sumerian Literature.

• Hail, pallid crescent, hail!
  Let me look on thee where thou sitt'st for aye
  Like memory—ghastly in the glare of day,
  But in the evening, light.
  • Dinah Craik, The Moon in the Morning.

• The stars were glittering in the heaven's dusk meadows,
  Far west, among those flowers of the shadows,
  The thin, clear crescent lustrous over her,
  Made Ruth raise question, looking through the bars
  Of heaven, with eyes half-oped, what God, what comer
  Unto the harvest of the eternal summer,
  Had flung his golden hook down on the field of stars.
  • Victor Hugo, Boaz Asleep.

• You brighten the night sky in the broad firmament, and illuminate the darkness. The Anuna gods stand by with prayers and supplications at your rising. The sweet sight of your resplendent crescent, full of loveliness, brings joy to the great lady of the Ki-ur, mother Ninlil.
  • Ishme-Dagan in a tablet (𒁾) to Nanna, Text online at The Electronic Text Corpus of Sumerian Literature, early 2nd millennium BCE.

• Every phase of our life belongs to us. The moon does not, except in appearance, lose her first thin, luminous curve, nor her silvery crescent, in rounding to her full.
  • Lucy Larcom, A New England Girlhood: Outlined from Memory, 1889, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, p. 7

• I was dumbfounded by truth
  you cut through lies
  [...]
  I saw the crescent
  You saw the whole of the moon
  • Mike Scott, The Whole of the Moon from the album This Is the Sea, 1985.

• The smile that flickers on baby's lips when he sleeps—does anybody know where it was born? Yes, there is a rumor that a young pale beam of a crescent moon touched the edge of a vanishing autumn cloud, and there the smile was first born in the dream of a dew-washed morning.
  • Rabindranath Tagore, Gitanjali, 61, 1912.

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