Wonder Quotes

Every day I see or hear something that more or less kills me with delight, that leaves me like a needle in the haystack of light.

The world, like a great iris of an even more gigantic eye, which has also just opened and stretched out to encompass everything, stared back at him.

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.

Self-knowledge leads to wonder, and wonder to curiosity and investigation, so that nothing interests people more than people, even if only one's own person.

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.

Knowledge would be fatal. It is the uncertainty that charms one. A mist makes things wonderful.

Tell them dear, that if eyes were made for seeing,Then beauty is its own excuse for being:Why thou wert there, O rival of the rose!I never sought to ask, I never knew:But, in my simple ignorance supposeThe selfsame power that brought me there brought you.

All of sudden, this shooting star went by, and all I could think was that they were listening to us somehow.

Is love the sweetness of flowers?

Grieve not because thou understand-not life's mystery; behind the veil is concealed many a delight.

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

Disneyland is like Alice stepping through the Looking Glass; to step through the portals of Disneyland will be like entering another world.

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

Everything has its wonders, even darkness and silence, and I learn, whatever state I may be in, therein to be content.

Splendid! They used to go up like great lilies and snapdragons and laburnums of fire and hang in the twilight all evening!

The ways of creation are wrapt in mystery. We may only marvel, and bow our head.

Perhaps it will be simplest to throw away the tags and generalize India with one all-comprehensive name, as the Land of Wonders.

The fairest thing we can experience is the mysterious. It is the fundamental emotion that stands at the cradle of true art and true science. It is the source of all true art and science. He who knows it not and can no longer wonder, no longer feel amazement, is as good as dead, a snuffed-out candle.

Haldir had gone on and was now climbing to the high flet. As Frodo prepared to follow him, he laid his hand upon the tree beside the ladder: never before had he been so suddenly and so keenly aware of the feel and texture of a tree's skin and of the life within it. He felt a delight in wood and the touch of it, neither as forester nor as carpenter; it was the delight of the living tree itself.

Man is a little germ that lives on an unimportant rock ball that revolves about a small star at the outskirts of an ordinary galaxy. ... I am absolutely amazed to discover myself on this rock ball rotating around a spherical fire. It's a very odd situation. And the more I look at things I cannot get rid of the feeling that existence is quite weird.

Each of us visits this Earth involuntarily, and without an invitation. For me, it is enough to wonder at the secrets.

If something is in me which can be called religious then it is the unbounded admiration for the structure of the world so far as our science can reveal it.

I walk the world in wonder.

This curious world we inhabit is more wonderful than convenient; more beautiful than it is useful; it is more to be admired and enjoyed than used.

This sense of wonder is the mark of the philosopher. Philosophy indeed has no other origin.

Everything a baby does strikes a parent as the most magical thing he/she has ever seen.

I urge a willingness to reserve a place in rational science for non-rational wonder.

The greatest invention in the world is the mind of a child.

Wonder is the feeling of the philosopher, and philosophy begins in wonder.

One marvel of a day he had walked so far that when he returned the moon was high and full and all the world was purple shadow and silver.

Thinking is wonderful, but the experience is even more wonderful.

Cows sometimes wear an expression resembling wonderment arrested on its way to becoming a question. In the eye of superior intelligence, on the other hand, lies the nil admirari spread out like the monotony of a cloudless sky.

In your hands The dog, the donkey, surely they know They are alive. Who would argue otherwise? But now, after years of consideration, I am getting beyond that. What about the sunflowers? What about The tulips, and the pines? Listen, all you have to do is start and There’ll be no stopping. What about mountains? What about water Slipping over rocks? And speaking of stones, what about The little ones you can Hold in your hands, their heartbeats So secret, so hidden it may take years Before, finally, you hear them?

The miracle of turning inklings into thoughts and thoughts into words and words into metal and print and ink never palls for me.

To me it is enough to wonder at the secrets

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

Herschel removed the speckled tent-roof from the world and exposed the immeasurable deeps of space, dim-flecked with fleets of colossal suns sailing their billion-leagued remoteness.

You can move through life seeing nothing as a miracle, or seeing everything as a miracle.

All my life I've looked at words as though I were seeing them for the first time.

I held my breath as we do sometimes to stop time when something wonderful has touched us.

The wonder of nature does not become smaller because one cannot measure it by the standards of human moral and human aims.

The finest emotion of which we are capable is the mystic emotion. Herein lies the germ of all art and all true science. Anyone to whom this feeling is alien, who is no longer capable of wonderment and lives in a state of fear is a dead man.

Let me keep my distance, always, from those who think they have the answers. Let me keep company always with those who say “Look!” and laugh in astonishment, and bow their heads. (from “Mysteries, Yes”)

Do not grow old, no matter how long you live. Never cease to stand like curious children before the Great Mystery into which we were born.

Whoever is devoid of the capacity to wonder, whoever remains unmoved, whoever cannot contemplate or know the deep shudder of the soul in enchantment, might just as well be dead for he has already closed his eyes upon life.

The jungle looked back at them with a vastness, a breathing moss-and-leaf silence, with a billion diamond and emerald insect eyes.

Everybody is I, you all know you are you. And wheresoever's beings exist throughout all galaxies it doesn't any difference. You are all of them, and when they come into being that's you coming into being, you know that very well. Only you don't have to remember the past in the same way you don't have to think about how you work your thyroid gland. You don't have to know how to shine the sun, you just do it, like you breathe. Doesn't it really astonish you that you are this fantastically complex thing, and that you're doing all of this and you never had any education on how to do it.

How many mysteries have you seen in your lifetime? How many nets pulled full over the boat's side, each silver body ready or not falling into submission? How many roses in early summer uncurling above the pale sands then falling back in unfathomable willingness? And what can you say? Glory to the rose and the leaf, to the seed, to the silver fish. Glory to time and the wild fields, and to joy. And to grief's shock and torpor, its near swoon.

The stars are the apexes of what wonderful triangles! What distant and different beings in the various mansions of the universe are contemplating the same one at the same moment!

Men go forth to marvel at the height of mountains, and the huge waves of the sea, the broad flow of the rivers, the vastness of the ocean, the orbits of the stars, and yet they neglect to marvel at themselves. Variant: Men go abroad to admire the heights of mountains, the mighty billows of the sea, the broad tides of rivers, the compass of the ocean, and the circuits of the stars, and pass themselves by.

The stars awaken a certain reverence, because though always present, they are inaccessible.

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

For still there are so many things that I have never seen: in every wood in every spring there is a different green.

Apart from man, no being wonders at its own experience.

Of all tools, an observatory is the most sublime. . . . What is so good in a college as an observatory? The sublime attaches to the door and to the first stair you ascent, that this is the road to the stars.

Wonder, and its expression in poetry and the arts, are among the most important things which seem to distinguish men from other animals, and intelligent and sensitive people from morons.

How is it possible that a being with such sensitive jewels as the eyes, such enchanted musical instruments as the ears, and such fabulous arabesque of nerves as the brain can experience itself anything less than a god.

O amazement of things-even the least particle!

Again, somehow, one saw life, a pure bead. I lifted the pencil again, useless though I knew it to be. But even as I did so, the unmistakable tokens of death showed themselves. The body relaxed, and instantly grew stiff. The struggle was over. The insignificant little creature now knew death. As I looked at the dead moth, this minute wayside triumph of so great a force over so mean an antagonist filled me with wonder. Just as life had been strange a few minutes before, so death was now as strange.

Lie on your back and look at the stars.