Wonder Quotes

“O, wonder! How many goodly creatures are there here! How beauteous mankind is! O brave new world, That has such people in't!”

“The clamorous owl that nightly hoots and wonders At our quaint spirits.”

“Is it not better to intimate our astonishment as we pass through this world if it be only for a moment ere we are swallowed up in the yeast of the abyss? I will lift up my hands and say Kosmos.”

“If the stars should appear but one night every thousand years how man would marvel and stare.”

“I do not wonder at a snowflake, a shell, a summer landscape, or the glory of the stars; but at the necessity of beauty under which the universe lies.”

“The stars awaken a certain reverence, because though always present, they are inaccessible; but all natural objects make a kindred impression, when the mind is open to their influence. Nature never wears a mean appearance. Neither does the wisest man extort her secret, and lose his curiosity by finding out all her perfection. Nature never became a toy to a wise spirit. The flowers, the animals, the mountains, reflected the wisdom of his best hour, as much as they had delighted the simplicity of his childhood.”

“Earth proudly wears the Parthenon As the best gem upon her zone.”

“This most excellent canopy, the air, look you, this brave o-erhanging firmament, this majestical roof fretted with golden fire.”

“I sat upon a promontory,And heard a mermaid, on a dolphin's back,Uttering such dulcet and harmonious breath,That the rude sea grew civil at her song;And certain stars shot madly from their spheres,To hear the sea-maid's music.”

“For we, which now behold these present days, Have eyes to wonder, but lack tongues to praise.”

“The foolish man wonders at the unusual, but the wise man at the usual.”

“Men love to wonder, and that is the seed of science.”

“Throw off your tiredness. Let me show you one tiny spot of the beauty that can't be spoken.”

“The secret of poetry is never explained,— is always new. We have not got farther than mere wonder at the delicacy of the touch, and the eternity it inherits. In every house a child that in mere play utters oracles, and knows not that they are such. 'T is as easy as breath. 'T is like this gravity, which holds the Universe together, and none knows what it is.”

“Philosophy, beginning in wonder, as Plato and Aristotle said, is able to fancy everything different from what it is. It sees the familiar as if it were strange, and the strange as if it were familiar. It can take things up and lay them down again. It rouses us from our native dogmatic slumber and breaks up our caked prejudices.”

“Is it not strange, that sheep's guts should hale souls out of men's bodies!”

“Our present moment is a mystery that we are part of. Here and now is where all the wonder of life lies hidden. And make no mistake about it, to strive to live completely in the present is to strive for what already is the case.”

“Many ingenious lovely things are gone / That seemed sheer miracle to the multitude.”

“I open my scuttle at night and see the far-sprinkled systems, All all I see multiplied as high as I can cipher edge but the rim of the farther systems. Wider and wider they spread, expanding, always expanding, Outward and outward and forever outward.”

“Look out into the July night, and see the broad belt of silver flame which flashes up the half of heaven, fresh and delicate as the bonfires of the meadow-flies. Yet the powers of numbers cannot compute its enormous age,—lasting as space and time,—embosomed in time and space.”

“Because a fact seems strange to you, you conclude that it is not one. ... All science, however, commences by being strange. Science is successive. It goes from one wonder to another. It mounts by a ladder. The science of to-day would seem extravagant to the science of a former time. Ptolemy would believe Newton mad.”

“A child said What is the grass? fetching it to me with full hands; How could I answer the child? I do not know what it is any more than he.”

“I believe a leaf of grass is no less than the journey-work of the stars.”

“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.”

“It is the essence of poetry to spring, like the rainbow daughter of Wonder, from the invisible, to abolish the past, and refuse all history.”