Quotes from Dacher Keltner

Visual design proved to be a fifth wonder of life. Buildings, terra-cotta warriors in China, dams, and paintings appeared in stories of awe from around the world.

Stories of spiritual and religious awe were a sixth wonder of life. These weren't as common as you might imagine, given our perennial search for nirvana, satori, bliss, or samadhi.

Stories of life and death, the seventh wonder of life, were common around the world.

Sources of collective effervescence—ceremonies, musical performances, sports, dances, rituals within churches—shift the rhythms of our bodies to a shared biological rhythm, breaking down that most basic barrier between self and other, the idea that we are physically separated by the boundaries of our skin.

This story leads us to epiphanies—when we suddenly understand essential truths about life—which were the eighth wonder of life.

This story leads us to epiphanies—when we suddenly understand essential truths about life—which were the eighth wonder of life. Around the world, people were awestruck by philosophical insights, scientific discoveries, metaphysical ideas, personal realizations, mathematical equations, and sudden disclosures (such as a wife leaving her husband for his best friend) that transform life in an instant.

Born to Be Good: The Science of a Meaningful Life.

These three stories of awe—the scientific, the cultural, and the personal—converge on an understanding of how we can find awe. Where do we find it? In response to what I will call the eight wonders of life, which include the strength, courage, and kindness of others; collective movement in actions like dance and sports; nature; music; art and visual design; mystical encounters; encountering life and death; and big ideas or epiphanies.

So often, vast circumstances confine us, like a life sentence in prison or tending to people who are dying, or racist immigration law, or combat, circumstances that seem to "always win." But in recognizing the vastness of such fates, that we are "a tiny speck" in a "huge place," we can find a "freeing feeling" and even an urge to build "real joy for all people." We so often experience transformative awe in the hardest of circumstances.

the "small self" effect of awe arises in all eight wonders of life, and not just vast nature. Finding awe in encounters with moral beauty, for example, or music, or when struck by big ideas, quiets the voice of that interfering and nagging neurotic.

Feeling part of something much larger than the self is music to our ears. This transformation of the self brought about by awe is a powerful antidote to the isolation and loneliness that is epidemic today.

We rise in popwer and make a difference in the world due to what is best about human nature, but we fall from power due to what is worst.

How does awe transform us? By quieting the nagging, self-critical, overbearing, status-conscious voice of our self, or ego, and empowering us to collaborate, to open our minds to wonders, and to see the deep patterns of life.

When our default self reigns too strongly, though, and we are too focused on ourselves, anxiety, rumination, depression, and self-criticism can overtake us. An overactive default self can undermine the collaborative efforts and goodwill of our communities. Many of today's social ills arise out of an overactive default self, augmented by self-obsessed digital technologies. Awe, it would seem, quiets this urgent voice of the default self.

Life can surprise us, though, in giving us the work we are here to do.

Institutions that embody moral beauty—universities, museums, cathedrals, courthouses, monuments, the criminal justice system—can inspire awe in those who live lives of privilege. For those who've been subjugated by such institutions, the feeling is often much closer to threat-based awe and its bodily expressions, shudders and cold shivers.

the big idea of U.S. history: the subjugation of people of color by a succession of social systems, from the genocide of Indigenous people to slavery to mass incarceration.

our daily diary studies in different countries, it was other people who were most likely to bring our participants everyday awe—actions of strangers, roommates, teachers, colleagues at work, people in the news, characters on podcasts, and our neighbors and family members. On