Selected wonder quotes

1. If one feels the need of something grand, something infinite, something that makes one feel aware of God, one need not go far to find it. I think that I see something deeper, more infinite, more eternal than the ocean in the expression of the eyes of a little baby when it wakes in the morning and coos or laughs because it sees the sun shining on its cradle.

2. A year spent in artificial intelligence is enough to make one believe in God.

3. How can cosmic religious feeling be communicated from one person to another, if it can give rise to no definite notion of a God and no theology? In my view, it is the most important function of art and science to awaken this feeling and keep it alive in those who are receptive to it.

4. It is enough for me to contemplate the mystery of conscious life perpetuating itself through all eternity, to reflect upon the marvelous structure of the universe which we dimly perceive, and to try humbly to comprehend an infinitesimal part of the intelligence manifested in nature.

5. The pursuit of truth and beauty is a sphere of activity in which we are permitted to remain children all our lives.

6. I've always believed in experiencing everything in life. When you walk out with blinders on, you cut yourself off from the angels and the fairies.

7. In all things of nature there is something of the marvelous.

8. What could possibly be more fantastic than reality?

9. Without wonder and insight, acting is just a trade. With it, it becomes creation.

10. Wisdom leads us back to childhood.

11. I maintain there is much more wonder in science than in pseudoscience. And in addition, to whatever measure this term has any meaning, science has the additional virtue, and it is not an inconsiderable one, of being true.

12. Somewhere, something incredible is waiting to be known.

13. Gather a shell from the strewn beach And listen at its lips: they sigh The same desire and mystery, The echo of the whole sea's speech.

14. An undevout astronomer is mad.

15. Poetry and imagination begin life. A child will fall on its knees on the gravel walk at the sight of a pink hawthorn in full flower, when it is by itself, to praise God for it.

16. America was still a land of wonder. The ancient spell still hung unbroken over the wild, vast world of mystery beyond the sea,-a land of romance, adventure, and gold.

17. The laws of nature are constructed in such a way as to make the universe as interesting as possible.

18. I doubt whether the world holds for any one a more soul-stirring surprise than the first adventure with ice-cream.

19. Maybe that's what life is... a wink of the eye and winking stars.

20. Wherever life takes us, there are always moments of wonder.

21. We have not the reverent feeling for the rainbow that the savage has, because we know how it is made. We have lost as much as we gained by prying into that matter.

22. What I want to know is this: Are the stars gold paper or is the gold paper stars?

23. I love all waste And solitary places; where we taste The pleasure of believing what we see Is boundless, as we wish our souls to be.

24. That I exist is a perpetual surprise which is life.

25. The significance which is in unity is an eternal wonder.

26. Touch a scientist and you touch a child.

27. Somehow, you need to cling to your optimism. Always look for the silver lining. Always look for the best in people. Try to see things through the eyes of a child. See the wonder in the simplest things. Never stop dreaming. Believe anything is possible.

28. The older I get, the more I look at movies as a moving miracle.

29. Wonder is the basis of worship.

30. Sometimes, when the spirit moves me I can do many wondrous things I wanna know when the spirit moves you Did ye get healed?

31. If one feels the need of something grand, something infinite, something that makes one feel aware of God, one need not go far to find it. I think that I see something deeper, more infinite, more eternal than the ocean in the expression of the eyes of a little baby when it wakes in the morning and coos or laughs because it sees the sun shining on its cradle.

32. To know that no one before you has seen an organ you are examining, to trace relationships that have occurred to no one before, to immerse yourself in the wondrous crystalline world of the microscope, where silence reigns, circumscribed by its own horizon, a blindingly white arena - all this is so enticing that I cannot describe it.

33. Why do we have to grow up? I know more adults who have the children's approach to life. They're people who don't give a hang what the Joneses do. You see them at Disneyland every time you go there. They are not afraid to be delighted with simple pleasures, and they have a degree of contentment with what life has brought - sometimes it isn't much, either.

34. A schoolmaster should have an atmosphere of awe, and walk wonderingly, as if he was amazed at being himself.

35. 'Prayer is our humble answer to the inconceivable surprise of living.'

36. The most incomprehensible thing about the world is that it is comprehensible.

37. The most beautiful and deepest experience a man can have is the sense of the mysterious. It is the underlying principle of religion as well as all serious endeavor in art and science. He who never had this experience seems to me, if not dead, then at least blind. To sense that behind anything that can be experienced there is a something that our mind cannot grasp and whose beauty and sublimity reaches us only indirectly and as a feeble reflection, this is religiousness. In this sense I am religious. To me it suffices to wonder at these secrets and to attempt humbly to grasp with my mind a mere image of the lofty structure of all that there is.

38. The size and age of the Cosmos are beyond ordinary human understanding. Lost somewhere between immensity and eternity is our tiny planetary home. In a cosmic perspective, most human concerns seem insignificant, even petty. And yet our species is young and curious and brave and shows much promise. In the last few millennia we have made the most astonishing and unexpected discoveries about the Cosmos and our place within it, explorations that are exhilarating to consider. They remind us that humans have evolved to wonder, that understanding is a joy, that knowledge is prerequisite to survival. I believe our future depends on how well we know this Cosmos in which we float like a mote of dust in the morning sky.

39. It is sometimes said that scientists are unromantic, that their passion to figure out robs the world of beauty and mystery. But is it not stirring to understand how the world actually works - that white light is made of colors, that color is the way we perceive the wavelengths of light, that transparent air reflects light, that in so doing it discriminates among the waves, and that the sky is blue for the same reason that the sunset is red? It does no harm to the romance of the sunset to know a little bit about it.

40. For all knowledge and wonder (which is the seed of knowledge) is an impression of pleasure in itself.

41. Humility is the luxurious art of reducing ourselves to a point, not to a small thing or a large one, but to a thing with no size at all, so that to it all the cosmic things are what they really are - of immeasurable stature. That the trees are high and the grasses short is a mere accident of our own foot-rules and our own stature. But to the spirit which has stripped off for a moment its own idle temporal standards the grass is an everlasting forest, with dragons for denizens; the stones of the road are as incredible mountains piled one upon the other; the dandelions are like gigantic bonfires illuminating the lands around; and the heath-bells on their stalks are like planets hung in heaven each higher than the other.

42. The most incredible thing about miracles is that they happen.

43. 'We should remember that there was once a discipline called natural philosophy. Unfortunately, this discipline seems not to exist today. It has been renamed science, but science of today is in danger of losing much of the natural philosophy aspect.'

44. 'I would rather live in a world where my life is surrounded by mystery than live in a world so small that my mind could comprehend it.'

45. To be an actor, you have to be a child.

46. If the stars should appear one night in a thousand years, how would men believe and adore, and preserve for many generations the remembrance of the city of God which had been shown! But every night come out these envoys of beauty, and light the universe with their admonishing smile.

47. Stuff your eyes with wonder . . . live as if you'd drop dead in ten seconds. See the world. It's more fantastic than any dream made or paid for in factories.

48. I have a friend who's an artist, and he sometimes takes a view which I don't agree with. He'll hold up a flower and say, 'Look how beautiful it is,' and I'll agree. But then he'll say, 'I, as an artist, can see how beautiful a flower is. But you, as a scientist, take it all apart and it becomes dull.' I think he's kind of nutty. [...] There are all kinds of interesting questions that come from a knowledge of science, which only adds to the excitement and mystery and awe of a flower. It only adds. I don't understand how it subtracts.

49. You know, the most amazing thing happened to me tonight. I was coming here, on the way to the lecture, and I came in through the parking lot. And you won't believe what happened. I saw a car with the license plate ARW 357. Can you imagine? Of all the millions of license plates in the state, what was the chance that I would see that particular one tonight? Amazing!

50. I love to lose myself in a mystery, to pursue my reason to an O altitudo.

51. The Age of Miracles is forever here!

52. For every man the world is as fresh as it was at the first day, and as full of untold novelties for him who has the eyes to see them.

53. I think what I want Disneyland to be most of all is a happy place - a place where adults and children can experience together some of the wonders of life, of adventure, and feel better because of it.

54. Tyger! Tyger! burning bright in the forests of the night, What immortal hand or eye Could frame thy fearful symmetry?

55. There are only two ways to live your life. One is as though nothing is a miracle. The other is as though everything is a miracle.

56. The Cosmos is all that is or ever was or ever will be. Our feeblest contemplations of the Cosmos stir us - there is a tingling in the spine, a catch in the voice, a faint sensation, as if a distant memory, of falling from a height. We know we are approaching the greatest of mysteries.

57. How is it that hardly any major religion has looked at science and concluded, 'This is better than we thought! The Universe is much bigger than our prophets said, grander, more subtle, more elegant?' Instead they say, 'No, no, no! My god is a little god, and I want him to stay that way.' A religion old or new, that stressed the magnificence of the universe as revealed by modern science, might be able to draw forth reserves of reverence and awe hardly tapped by the conventional faiths. Sooner or later, such a religion will emerge.

58. From without, no wonderful effect is wrought within ourselves, unless some interior, responding wonder meets it. That the starry vault shall surcharge the heart with all rapturous marvelings, is only because we ourselves are greater miracles, and superber trophies than all the stars in universal space. Wonder interlocks with wonder; and then the confounding feeling comes. No cause have we to fancy, that a horse, a dog, a fowl, ever stand transfixed beneath yon skyey load of majesty. But our soul's arches underfit into its; and so, prevent the upper arch from falling on us with unsustainable inscrutableness.

59. If we study Nature attentively in its great evolutions as in its minutest works, we cannot fail to recognize the possibility of enchantment - giving to that word its exact significance. Man does not create forces; he employs the only force that exists and which includes all others, namely Motion, the breath incomprehensible of the sovereign Maker of the universe.

60. My entire delight was in observing without being myself noticed,- if I could have been invisible, all the better. I was absolutely interested in men and their ways, as I was interested in marmots and chamois, in tomtits and trout. If only they would stay still and let me look at them, and not get into their holes and up their heights! The living inhabitation of the world - the grazing and nesting in it, - the spiritual power of the air, the rocks, the waters, to be in the midst of it, and rejoice and wonder at it, and help it if I could, - happier if it needed no help of mine, - this was the essential love of Nature in me, this the root of all that I have usefully become, and the light of all that I have rightly learned.

61. Where great whales come sailing by, Sail and sail, with unshut eye, Round the world for ever and aye? When did music come this way? Children dear, was it yesterday?

62. Knowledge and wonder are the dyad of our worthy lives as intellectual beings. Voyager did wonders for our knowledge, but performed just as mightily in the service of wonder-and the two elements are complementary, not independent or opposed. The thought fills me with awe-a mechanical contraption that could fit in the back of a pickup truck, traveling through space for twelve years, dodging around four giant bodies and their associated moons, and finally sending exquisite photos across more than four light-hours of space from the farthest planet in our solar system.

63. I don't think there is any better worship than wonder.

64. it's spring when the world is puddle-wonderful

65. Shouldn't the shining dots of the sky be as accessible as the black dots on the map of France?

66. There is always in the healthy mind an obscure prompting that religion teaches us rather to dig than to climb; that if we could once understand the common clay of earth we should understand everything. Similarly, we have the sentiment that if we could destroy custom at a blow and see the stars as a child sees them, we should need no other apocalypse. This is the great truth which has always lain at the back of baby-worship, and which will support it to the end

67. resident mockery give us an hour for magic

68. We are an impossibility in an impossible universe

69. The important thing is not to stop questioning; curiosity has its own reason for existing. One cannot help but be in awe when contemplating the mysteries of eternity, of life, of the marvelous structure of reality. It is enough if one tries merely to comprehend a little of the mystery every day. The important thing is not to stop questioning; never lose a holy curiosity.

70. The most beautiful experience we can have is the mysterious. It is the fundamental emotion that stands at the cradle of true art and true science. Whoever does not know it and can no longer wonder, no longer marvel, is as good as dead, and his eyes are dimmed. It was the experience of mystery - even if mixed with fear - that engendered religion. A knowledge of the existence of something we cannot penetrate, our perceptions of the profoundest reason and the most radiant beauty, which only in their most primitive forms are accessible to our minds: it is this knowledge and this emotion that constitute true religiosity. In this sense, and only this sense, I am a deeply religious man.

71. There is a place with four suns in the sky - red, white, blue, and yellow; two of them are so close together that they touch, and star-stuff flows between them. I know of a world with a million moons. I know of a sun the size of the Earth - and made of diamond....The universe is vast and awesome, and for the first time we are becoming part of it.

72. Look at the stars! look, look up at the skies! O look at all the fire-folk sitting in the air!

73. But some of us awake in the night with strange phantasms of enchanted hills and gardens, of fountains that sing in the sun, of golden cliffs overhanging murmuring seas, of plains that stretch down to sleeping cities of bronze and stone, and of shadowy companies of heroes that ride caparisoned white horses along the edges of thick forests; and then we know that we have looked back through the ivory gates into that world of wonder which was ours before we were wise and unhappy.

74. Poets say science takes away from the beauty of the stars - mere globs of gas atoms. Nothing is 'mere'. I too can see the stars on a desert night, and feel them. But do I see less or more? The vastness of the heavens stretches my imagination - stuck on this carousel my little eye can catch one-million-year-old light. A vast pattern - of which I am a part... What is the pattern or the meaning or the why? It does not do harm to the mystery to know a little more about it. For far more marvelous is the truth than any artists of the past imagined it. Why do the poets of the present not speak of it? What men are poets who can speak of Jupiter if he were a man, but if he is an immense spinning sphere of methane and ammonia must be silent?

75. Be aware of wonder. And then remember the Dick and Jane books and the first word you learned - the biggest word of all - LOOK.

76. Wisdom begins in wonder.

77. Shouldn't the shining dots of the sky be as accessible as the black dots on the map of France?

78. Why it is that of all the billions and billions of strange objects in the Cosmos -- novas, quasars, pulsars, black holes -- you are beyond doubt the strangest? [citation needed]

79. To see a World in a Grain of Sand And a Heaven in a Wild Flower, Hold Infinity in the palm of your hand And Eternity in an hour.

80. If my soul could get away from this so-called prison, be granted all the list of attributes generally bestowed on spirits, my first ramble on spirit-wings would not be among the volcanoes of the moon. Nor should I follow the sunbeams to their sources in the sun. I should hover about the beauty of our own good star. I should not go moping among the tombs, not around the artificial desolation of men. I should study Nature's laws in all their crossings and unions; I should follow magnetic streams to their source and follow the shores of our magnetic oceans. I should go among the rays of the aurora, and follow them to their beginnings, and study their dealings and communions with other powers and expressions of matter. And I should go to the very center of our globe and read the whole splendid page from the beginning. But my first journeys would be into the inner substance of flowers, and among the folds and mazes of Yosemite's falls. How grand to move about in the very tissue of falling columns, and in the very birthplace of their heavenly harmonies, looking outward as from windows of ever-varying transparency and staining!

81. * 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. ~ 61

82. What is there in 'Paradise Lost' to elevate and astonish like Herschel or Somerville?

83. But the little boy said... 'There are so many colors in the rainbow So many colors in the morning sun So many colors in the flowers and I see every one.'

84. With trembling hands, I made a tiny breach in the upper left hand corner... widening the hole a little, I inserted the candle and peered in... at first I could see nothing, the hot air escaping from the chamber causing the candle to flicker. Presently, details of the room emerged slowly from the mist, strange animals, statues and gold - everywhere the glint of gold. For the moment - an eternity it must have seemed to the others standing by - I was struck dumb with amazement, and when Lord Carnarvon, unable to stand in suspense any longer, inquired anxiously 'Can you see anything?', it was all I could do to get out the words 'Yes, wonderful things'.

85. I said to the almond tree: 'Speak to me of God.' and the almond tree blossomed.

86. In planning a new picture, we don't think of grownups and we don't think of children, but just of that fine, clean, unspoiled spot down deep in every one of us that maybe the world has made us forget...

87. There is obviously a place in life for a religious attitude for awe and astonishment at existence. That is also a basis for respect for existence. We don't have much of it in this culture, even though we call it materialistic. In this culture we call materialistic, today we are of course bent on the total destruction of material and its conversion into junk and poisonous gases. This is of course not a materialistic culture because it has no respect for material. And respect is in turn based on wonder.

88. I experienced as a child at the age of four or five when my father showed me a compass. That this needle behaved in such a determined way was all out of place concerning the manner of the events which could find a place in the unconscious vocabulary of concepts: I still remember today: that this experience has left a permanent impression with me.

89. A still small voice spake unto me, 'Thou art so full of misery, Were it not better not to be?' Then to the still small voice I said; 'Let me not cast in endless shade What is so wonderfully made.'

90. J'ai vu des archipels sideraux! et des iles Dont les cieux delirants sont ouverts au vogueur: Est-ce en ces nuits sans fond que tu dors et t'exiles, Million d'oiseaux d'or, o future Vigueur?

91. Words fail me. When he stood up there at the bat before 50,000 persons, calling the balls and the strikes with gestures for the benefit of the Cubs in their dugout, and then with two strikes on him, pointed out where he was going to hit the next one and hit it there, I gave up. That fellow is not human.

92. Leonard Washington : [after Grits 'n' Gravy rolls three sevens in a row] Boy, you are the goddamn devil.

93. Once in everyone's life there is apt to be a period when he is fully awake, instead of half asleep. I think of those five years in Maine as the time when this happened to me ... I was suddenly seeing, feeling, and listening as a child sees, feels, and listens. It was one of those rare interludes that can never be repeated, a time of enchantment. I am fortunate indeed to have had the chance to get some of it down on paper.

94. (21 November 1917) Variant translation: Anyone who believes cannot experience miracles. By day one cannot see any stars.

95. The most unfathomable schools and sages have never attained to the gravity which dwells in the eyes of a baby of three months old. It is the gravity of astonishment at the universe, and astonishment at the universe is not mysticism, but a transcendent common-sense. The fascination of children lies in this: that with each of them all things are remade, and the universe is put again upon its trial. As we walk the streets and see below us those delightful bulbous heads, three times too big for the body, which mark these human mushrooms, we ought always primarily to remember that within every one of these heads there is a new universe, as new as it was on the seventh day of creation. In each of those orbs there is a new system of stars, new grass, new cities, a new sea.

96. We must see all life as if we were children.

97. L'etude prete une sorte de magie a tout ce qui nous environne.

98. It was like discovering a complete wine-filled cellar filled with bottles of an amazing wine of a kind and flavor never tasted before. It quite intoxicated me:.

99. Twinkle, twinkle, little star, How I wonder what you are, Up above the world so high, Like a diamond in the sky!

100. 'Science kills credulity and superstition, but to the well-balanced mind it enhances the feeling of wonder, of veneration, and of kinship which we feel in the presence of the miraculous universe.' (p.108)