#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.”

“O amazement of things-even the least particle!”

“The wonders of nature are endless.”

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

“Marvelous are the innocent.”

“Landscapes of great wonder and beauty lie under our feet and all around us. They are discovered in tunnels in the ground, the heart of flowers, the hollows of trees, fresh-water ponds, seaweed jungles between tides, and even drops of water. Life in these hidden worlds is more startling in reality than anything we can imagine. How could this earth of ours, which is only a speck in the heavens, have so much variety of life, so many curious and exciting creatures?”

“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.”

“The large shiny black forehead of the first whale was no more than two yards from us when it sank beneath the surface of the water, then we saw the huge blue-black bulk glide quietly under the raft right beneath our feet. It lay there for some time, dark and motionless, and we held our breath as we looked down on the gigantic curved back of a mammal a good deal longer than the raft.”

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

“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.”

“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.”

“The wonder is that we can see these trees and not wonder more.”

“We are impressed and even daunted by the immense Universe to be explored. "What we know is a point to what we do not know."”

“It is sometimes said that the tragedy of an artist's life is that he cannot realise his ideal. But the true tragedy that dogs the steps of most artists is that they realise their ideal too absolutely. For, when the ideal is realised, it is robbed of its wonder and its mystery, and becomes simply a new starting-point for an ideal that is other than itself.”

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

“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.”

“Without the suitable conditions life could not exist. But both life and its conditions set forth the operations of inscrutable Power. We know not its origin; we know not its end. And the presumption, if not the degradation, rests with those who place upon the throne of the universe a magnified image of themselves, and make its doings a mere colossal imitation of their own. Wonder was the motive that led people to philosophy ... wonder is a kind of desire in knowledge. It is the cause of delight because it carries with it the hope of discovery.”

“Because philosophy arises from awe, a philosopher is bound in his way to be a lover of myths and poetic fables. Poets and philosophers are alike in being big with wonder.”

“Wonder is the desire for knowledge.”

“Wonder was the motive that led people to philosophy ... wonder is a kind of desire in knowledge. It is the cause of delight because it carries with it the hope of discovery.”

“Your eyes wider than distance, this life is sweeter than fiction.”

“I feel like the earth, astonished at fragrance borne in the air, made pregnant with mystery from a drop of rain.”

“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.”

“Bees do have a smell, you know, and if they don't they should, for their feet are dusted with spices from a million flowers.”

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

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