Quotes About Wonder

curiosity only ever asks one simple question: "Is there anything you're interested in?

But why must everything always have a practical application?

He seemed to live in a state of uninterrupted marvel, and he encouraged them to do the same. He didn't so much teach them how to write poetry, they said, but why: because of delight. Because of stubborn gladness. He told them that they must live their most creative lives as a means of fighting back against the ruthless furnace of this world.

The often surprising results of that hunt—that's what I call Big Magic.

It was like one of those dreams where you discover a previously unknown room in your house and you have that expansive feeling that your life has more possibility to it than you thought it did.

Don't we have the right to not stop seeking until we get as close to the source of wonder as possible? Even if it means coming to India and kissing trees in the moonlight for awhile.

Which left me with nothing but a dazzled heart and the sense that I live in a most remarkable world, thick with mysteries. It all called to mind the British physicist Sir Arthur Eddington's memorable explanation of how the universe works: "Something unknown is doing we don't know what." But the best part is: I don't need to know what.

as Walt Whitman once wrote, stand 'apart from the pulling and hauling…amused, complacent, compassionating, idle, unitary… both in and out of the game and watching and wondering at it all.

Marilynne Robinson calls "an overabundance that is magical." That magical overabundance?

It all called to mind the British physicist Sir Arthur Eddington's memorable explanation of how the universe works: "Something unknown is doing we don't know what." But the best part is: I don't need to know what.

The unnecessary and superfluous volume of pure beauty around here is not the be believed.

You see, I have never felt the need to invent a world beyond this world, for this world has always seemed large and beautiful enough for me.

You see, I have never felt the need to invent a world beyond this world, for this world has always seemed large and beautiful enough for me. I have wondered why it is not large and beautiful enough for others -- why they must dream up new and marvelous spheres, or long to live elsewhere, beyond this dominion...All I ever wanted was to know *this* world.

Again the thunder clapped. Still Eva stood in the field. Maybe, she thought, a girl struck by lightning would split down the middle and become two girls, and then she'd have a friend. She held out her watch with its metal band, to call the lightning down.

But like the legless man, I'm unaccountably fascinated by those who can dance.

He looked down at her as he eased from the bed. Why such a creature of light and love and life should have come to him, he could not fathom. But he was grateful. Very grateful.

At first she saw only the mess of roots. There wasn't space in there, surely, for a small dog, let alone a man and boy. But as she watched, a huge hand slapped down on the edge. She started for the hole even as Caliban emerged, head and broad shoulders blackened, clutching Indio to his chest like Hephaestus rising from his underworld forge. She'd never seen such a wonderful sight.

Her lack of maidenly scruple would have amused me at another moment, but just now her face was so grimly determined that I could only wonder what she had in mind. Nothing could have been less seductive, anyway, than her expression at that moment.

People think librarians are unromantic, unimaginative. This is not true. We are people whose dreams run in particular ways. Ask a mountain climber what he feels when he sees a mountain; a lion tamer what goes through his mind when he meets a new lion; a doctor confronted with a beautiful malfunctioning body. The idea of a library full of books, the books full of knowledge, fills me with fear and love and courage and endless wonder.

The idea of a library full of books, the books full of knowledge, fills me with fear and love and courage and endless wonder.

I sometimes wonder what it would be like to be the respected patriarch of an ordinary English family. Very boring, Emerson.

I had seen engravings of the Great Pyramid and read extensively about it; I thought I was prepared for the sight. But I was not. It was so much grander than I had imagined! The massive bulk bursts suddenly on one's sight as one mounts the steep slope leading up to the rocky platform. It fills the sky. And the color! No black-and-white engraving can possibly prepare one for the color of Egyptian limestone, mellow gold in the sunlight against a heavenly-blue vault.

His house to me was a child was a heart of happiness. If there is a wonder childhood possesses which makes it forever superior to what shall come after, it is the happy and uncritical love of whatever is happy, place or person, it does not matter which.

It baffled her, the world. She did not want to leave it yet.