166 Wonder Quotes

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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

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

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.

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

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.

That I exist is a perpetual surprise which is life.

The significance which is in unity is an eternal wonder.

Touch a scientist and you touch a child.

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.

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

Wonder is the basis of worship.

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

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.

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.

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.

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

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

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

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.

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.

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.

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

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

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]

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.

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!

* 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

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

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.'

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'.

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

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...

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.

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.

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.'

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?

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.

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

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.

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

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.

We must see all life as if we were children.

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

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:.

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

'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)

Here is a shop of wonderment. From every land has come a prize; Rich spices from the Orient, And fruit that knew Italian skies, And figs that ripened by the sea In Smyrna, nuts from hot Brazil, Strange pungent meats from Germany, And currants from a Grecian hill.

The fine purple The purest gold The red of the Sacred Heart The grey of a ghost The 'L' of the lips are open To the 'O' of the Host The 'V' of the velvet The 'E' of my eye The eye in wonder The eye that sees The 'I' that loves you.

Her music remains reassuringly the same ecstatic alchemy of the humdrum and otherworldly. Recalling the hello-clouds wonder of The Big Sky from 1985's Hounds of Love or the frank paean to menstruation that is Strange Phenomena from her debut, The Kick Inside, Aerial finds Bush marvelling in the magic of the everyday: the wind animating a skirt hanging on a clothes line, the trace of footprints leading into the sea, the indecipherable codes of birdsong.

I shall in no time forget that moment. We felt as if we had had in our souls a clear passing glimpse into this wondrous World.

The current of the world has its boundaries, otherwise it could have no existence, but its purpose is not shown in the boundaries which restrain it, but in its movement, which is toward perfection. The wonder is not that there should be obstacles and sufferings in this world, but that there should be law and order, beauty and joy, goodness and love.

Mahomet can work no miracles; he often answers impatiently: I can work no miracles. I? 'I am a Public Preacher;' appointed to preach this doctrine to all creatures. Yet the world, as we can see, had really from of old been all one great miracle to him. Look over the world, says he; is it not wonderful, the work of Allah; wholly 'a sign to you,' if your eyes were open!

I walked in my greatcoat Down through the days of the leaves. No before after, yes after before We were shining our light into the days of blooming wonder In the eternal presence, in the presence of the flame.

People who have worked with me say I am 'innocence in action'. They say I have the innocence and unself-consciousness of a child. Maybe I have. I still look at the world with uncontaminated wonder, and with all living things I have a terrific sympathy. It was the most natural thing in the world for me to imagine that mice and squirrels might have feelings just like mine.

We were at last in Monte Cristo's country, fairly into the country of the fabulous, where extravagance ceases to exist because everything is extravagant, and where the wildest dreams come true.

This cabinet is formed of gold And pearl and crystal shining bright, And within it opens into a world And a little lovely moony night.

One day, back there in the good old days when I was nine and the world was full of every kind of magnificence, and life was still a delightful and mysterious dream, my cousin Mourad, who was considered crazy by everybody who knew him except me, came to my house at four in the morning and woke me up by tapping on the window of my room. 'Aram,' he said. I jumped out of bed and looked out the window. I couldn't believe what I saw. It wasn't morning yet, but it was summer and with daybreak not many minutes around the corner of the world it was light enough for me to know I wasn't dreaming. My cousin Mourad was sitting on a beautiful white horse.

How did roses ever happen?

Here's what I've started thinking: All the wonder of God happens right above our arithmetic and formula. The more I climb outside my pat answers, the more invigorating the view, the more my heart enters into worship.

It is human, I think, when we encounter the marvelous to try and bring away some of it with us

Opals: 'You will always remember the first time you hold in your hand the queen of all gemstones; a brilliant precious opal. Beauty in nature will seldom speak more clearly or boldly to you as the first moment when you peer spellbound into the magnificent luster of the opal's kaleidoscopic inferno. One must think it would be God's own vision if he held in his hand the Earth itself to gaze at the heavenly fires of her aurora borealis. Seduced, as you gaze into the opal's labyrinthine nebula of fires and color, you will know that were the expanses of the universe ever to be contained they would abide in the effulgent opal's blaze. Resplendent hues of unfathomable color and fire leap from its form. Your eyes and entire being will satiate with visual harmonies of color. There are greens that leave jealousy without color; greens with depths that pale rich emeralds to light jades. Opulent blends dance before you in infinite shards of light infused with a cosmos of motley infinitudes of reds, like blood red roses; deeper than any crimson, ruby oxblood red. The intense blues shift from sapphire and turquoise and cerulean to cobalt salted glass with depths like the heart of the ocean; azure visions crisp as any October sky and as sullen as the most beautiful blue eyes love's envy has ever known. It will only take one gaze, and you too will be forever in love.'

Birth: 'I am a contemplative person by nature, and as it is such, there has seldom been a period of time that has gone by wherein I did not reflect back to the moments my children were born. What I remember most; having had a true lasting impact on me are two things. Of the two, what I consider most awe-inspiring was their first breath. I have thought intently about it over the years; about its profound implications on my understanding of the mysterious world around us, and ultimately about its paradoxical beauties. There I stood in each case as they came into the world, and I witnessed their very first, amazing and miraculous breath. With that breath came the animations of life and their helpless, compelling cries. The second thing that has continued to impact me is as this happened, in that instant of their springing into being, my wife and I helplessly collapsed into an embrace, and together wept tears of utter and absolute humility and joy.'

there are more things twixt the vermiform appendix and nirvana than are dreamt of in thy philosophy horatio

The essential rectitude of our view of children lies in the fact that we feel them and their ways to be supernatural while, for some mysterious reason, we do not feel ourselves or our own ways to be supernatural. The very smallness of children makes it possible to regard them as marvels; we seem to be dealing with a new race, only to be seen through a microscope. I doubt if anyone of any tenderness or imagination can see the hand of a child and not be a little frightened of it. It is awful to think of the essential human energy moving so tiny a thing; it is like imagining that human nature could live in the wing of a butterfly or the leaf of a tree. When we look upon lives so human and yet so small, we feel as if we ourselves were enlarged to an embarrassing bigness of stature. We feel the same kind of obligation to these creatures that a deity might feel if he had created something that he could not understand.

But we have seen it in the air, A fairy like a William Pear

doctors have come from distant cities just to see me stand over my bed disbelieving what they're seeing they say I must be one of the wonders of god's own creation and as far as they can see they can offer no explanation

There are stranger things on heaven and earth than are dreamt of in your philosophy

: with what scientific stoicism he walks through the land of wonders, unwondering :

It's all magic. :-)

I don't know about you, but I practice a disorganized religion. I belong to an unholy disorder. We call ourselves 'Our Lady of Perpetual Astonishment.'

When I read Shakespeare I am struck with wonder That such trivial people should muse and thunder In such lovely language.

You hail from Dream-land, Dragon-fly? A stranger hither? So am I, And (sooth to say) I wonder why We either of us came!

One of the English science-fiction writers once said, 'Sometimes I think we're alone in the universe, and sometimes I think we're not. In either case the idea is quite staggering.' ... I must say I agree with him.

The Admiral says that he never beheld so fair a thing: trees all along the river, beautiful and green, and different from ours, with flowers and fruits each according to their kind, many birds and little birds which sing very sweetly.

You don't believe magic is possible in lives lived within traditional boundaries.

You know you're in love when you can't fall asleep because reality is finally better than your dreams.

From there to here, from here to there, funny things are everywhere.

Young cat! If you keep Your eyes open enough, Oh, the stuff you will learn! The most wonderful stuff!

Roaming through the jungle of 'oohs' and 'ahs,' searching for a more agreeable noise, I live a life of primitivity with the mind of a child and an unquenchable thirst for sharps and flats.

To man, that was in th' evening made, Stars gave the first delight; Admiring, in the gloomy shade, Those little drops of light.

My curiosity sister of larks.

Where did you come from baby dear? Out of the everywhere into the here.