Wonder Quotes

Sometimes I spend all day trying to count the leaves on a single tree... Of course I have to give up, but by then I'm half crazy with the wonder of it--the abundance of the leaves, the quietness of the branches, the hopelessness of my effort. And I am in that delicious and important place, roaring with laughter, full of earth-praise.

I have seen landscapes . . . which, under a particular light, make me feel that at any moment a giant might raise his head over the next ridge.

This is an evening of wonders, indeed!

Let me keep my mind on what matters, which is my work, which is mostly standing still and learning to be astonished.

There is beauty in everything, even in silence and darkness.

To me, Beauty is the wonder of wonders...It is only shallow people who do not judge by appearances.

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.

All my lifeI have been restless--I have felt there is somethingmore wonderful than gloss--than wholeness--than staying at home.

This whole earth which we inhabit is but a point in space. How far apart, think you, dwell the most distant inhabitants of yonder star, the breadth of whose disk cannot be appreciated by our instruments?

Truly, we live with mysteries too marvelous to be understood. How grass can be nourishing in the mouths of the lambs. How rivers and stones are forever in allegiance with gravity while we ourselves dream of rising.

The Highest to which people can attain is wonder; and if the prime phenomenon makes them wonder, let them be content; nothing higher can it give them, and nothing further should they seek for behind it; there is the limit.

I find nothing in fables more astonishing than my experience in every hour. One moment of a man's life is a fact so stupendous as to take the luster out of fiction.

Man's wonder grows with his knowledge.

We must not feel a childish disgust at the investigations of the meaner animals. For there is something marvelous in all natural things.

Therefore, even the lover of myth is a philosopher; for myth is composed of wonder.

One of the strange things about living in the world is that it is only now and then one is quite sure one is going to live forever and ever and ever.

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

Be a loner. That gives you time to wonder.

Fancy sleeping on air. I wonder if anyone's done it before. I don't suppose they have. Oh, bother—-Scrubb probably has!

When I opened my eyes I saw nothing but the pool of nocturnal sky, for I was lying on my back with out-stretched arms, face to face with that hatchery of stars. Only half awake, still unaware that those depths were sky, having no roof between those depths and me, no branches to screen them, no root to cling to, I was seized with vertigo and felt myself as if flung forth and plunging downward like a diver.

Many thousands of people have had the experience of finding the first friend, and it is none the less a wonder; as great a wonder (pace the novelists) as first love, or even greater.

My intellectual development was retarded, as a result of which I began to wonder about space and time only when I had already grown up.

Live your life... as though everything is a miracle.

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.

Wonder [admiratio astonishment, marvel] is a kind of desire for knowledge. The situation arises when one sees an effect and does not know its cause, or when the cause of the particular effect is one that exceeds his power of understanding. Hence, wonder is a cause of pleasure insofar as there is annexed the hope of attaining understanding of that which one wants to know. ... For desire is especially aroused by the awareness of ignorance, and consequently a man takes the greatest pleasure in those things which he discovers for himself or learns from the ground up.

Think and wonder, wonder and think.

Never say there is nothing beautiful in the world anymore. There is always something to make you wonder in the shape of a tree, the trembling of a leaf.

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

To wonder at nothing when it happens, to consider nothing impossible before it has come to pass.

That I exist is a perpetual surprise which is life.

If you love a flower that lives on a star, it is sweet to look at the sky at night. All the stars are a-bloom with flowers.

Grandfather's been dead all these years, but if you lifted my skull, by God, in the convolutions of my brain you'd find the big ridges of his thumbprint. He touched me. As I said earlier, he was a sculptor. 'I hate a Roman named Status Quo!' he said to me. 'Stuff your eyes with wonder,' he said, '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.

And at night I love to listen to the stars. It is like five hundred million little bells.

Every realm of nature is marvelous.

Marvelous are the innocent.

All understanding begins in wonder!

When a mystery is too overpowering, one dare not disobey.

Butterflies are but flowers that blew away one sunny day when Nature was feeling at her most inventive and fertile.

The Law of Wonder rules my life at last,...I burn each second of my life to LoveEach second of my life burns out in LoveIn each leaping second Love lives afresh.

How sublime to look down on the workhouse of nature, to see her clouds, hail, snow, rain, thunder, all fabricated at our feet!

We soon get through with Nature. She excites an expectation which she cannot satisfy. The merest child which has rambled into a copsewood dreams of a wildness so wild and strange and inexhaustible as Nature can never show him.

I can sometimes sit for two hours in a room with almost no thought. Just complete stillness. Sometimes when I go for walks, there's also complete stillness; there's no mental labeling of sense perceptions. There's simply a sense of awe or wonder or openness, and that's beautiful.

The significance which is in unity is an eternal wonder.

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.

I see in Nature a magnificent structure... that must fill a thinking person with a feeling of humility.

The moose is singularly grotesque and awkward to look at. Why should it stand so high at the shoulders? Why have so long a head? Why have no tail to speak of?

From wonder into wonder existence opens.

He who can no longer pause to wonder and stand rapt in awe, is as good as dead; his eyes are closed.

Nature seemed to me full of wonders, and I wanted to steep myself in them. Every stone, every plant, every single thing seemed alive and indescribably marvelous. I immersed myself in nature, crawled, as it were, into the very essence of nature and away from the whole human world.

Wisdom belongs in wonder.

It is so wonderful to our neurologists that a man can see without his eyes, that it does not occur to them that is just as wonderful that he should see with them; and that is ever the difference between the wise and the unwise: the latter wonders at what is unusual, the wise man wonders at the usual.

Philosophy begins with wonder.

For this feeling of wonder shows that you are a philosopher, since wonder is the only beginning of philosophy.

Isn’t it wonderful the way the world holds both the deeply serious, and the unexpectedly mirthful?

We ran as if to meet the moon.

One should never count the years -- one should instead count one's interests. I have kept young trying never to lose my childhood sense of wonderment. I'm glad I still have a vivid curiosity about the world I live in.

For through wondering human beings now and in the beginning have been led to philosophizing.

Compounding is the 8th wonder of the world.

The scientist is activated by a wonder and awe before the mysterious comprehensibility of the universe which is yet finally beyond his grasp. In its profoundest depths it is inaccessible to man.

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.