Quotes About Wonder

Horrors, said Elphaba. It was her first word, and it was greeted with silence. Even the moon, the lambent bowl among the trees, seemed to pause. Horrors? Elphaba said again, looking around. Though her mouth was serious, her eyes glowed; she had realized her own accomplishment. She was nearly two years old. The big sharp teeth in her mouth could not keep her words locked inside anymore. Horrors, she tried in a whisper. Horrors.

Was it an accident I saw that, Fiyero wondered, looking at the manager with new eyes. Or is it just that the world unwraps itself to you, again and again, as soon as you are ready to see it anew?

She had that look a child has only a few times in its life, when the child has bettered her betters. The expression isn't smug, though adults often take it for smugness. It's something else. Maybe relief at having confirmed through personal experience the long-held suspicion of our species, that the enchanted world of childhood is merely a mask for something else, a more subtle and paradoxical magic. - p. 157

Good gracious, dear, all of life is a spell. You know that.

Besides, thought the girl, what miracle didn't look ridiculous while it was happening? If a miracle was ordinary, it would be like, just, so what?

Maurice Maeterlinck's play The Blue Bird.

I believe that if someone always looked at the skies, one would end up with wings.

And he beholds the moon; like a rounded fragment of ice filled with motionless light.

By trying to understand everything, everything makes me dream

Never had he beheld such a magnificent brown skin, so entrancing a figure, such dainty, transparent fingers. He stood gazing in wonder at her work-basket as if it was something extraordinary. What was her name? Where did she live and what sort of life did she lead? What was her past? He wanted to know what furniture she had in her bedroom, the dresses she wore, the people she knew; even his physical desire for her gave way to a deeper yearning, a boundless, aching curiosity.

Coming joys, like tropical shores, throw over the immensity before them their inborn softness, an odorous wind, and we are lulled by this intoxication without a thought of the horizon that we do not even know.

It was not the first time that they had seen trees, a blue sky, meadows; that they had heard the water flowing and the wind blowing in the leaves; but, no doubt, they had never admired all this, as if Nature had not existed before, or had only begun to be beautiful since the gratification of their desires.

Birkaç y?ld?z kayd? birden, dev bir füzenin parabolüne benzer bir ÅŸeyler çizdi. ''Ä°ÅŸte bak dünyalar yok oluyor,'' dedi Bouvard. Gene Pecuchet ald? sözü:''Bir gün bizimki de tepetaklak olursa, y?ld?zlar?n yurttaÅŸlar? bizim ÅŸimdi heyecanland???m?zdan daha fazla heyecanlanmayacaklar. Böyle düÅŸünceler gururunu yerle bir ediyor insan?n.

I said, 'If other beings besides us exist on Earth, why didn't we meet them a long time ago?

The most exciting phrase to hear in science, the one that heralds new discoveries, is not "Eureka!" (I found it!) but "That's funny . . ." —Isaac Asimov

A wood at night, or even more at twilight, can be a strange place. Fear begins to come more quickly in a wood, with darkness and twilight, than in any other place I know.

Genius: the ability to prolong one's childhood.

We shall dive down through black abysses...and in that lair of the Deep Ones we shall dwell amidst wonder and glory forever.

Wonder had gone away, and he had forgotten that life is only a set of pictures in the brain, among which there is no difference betwixt those born of real things and those born of inward dreamings, and no cause to value the one above the other.

God! What wonder that across the earth a great architect went mad

When Kleiner showed me the sky-line of New York I told him that man is like the coral insect — designed to build vast, beautiful, mineral things for the moon to delight in after he is dead.

Wonder had gone away, and he had forgotten that all life is only a set of pictures in the brain, among which there is no difference betwixt those born of real things and those born of inward dreamings, and no cause to value the one above the other. Custom had dinned into his ears

Was tempted to quote Walden—"Why should I feel lonely? Is not our planet in the Milky Way?"—but refrained. How can I get lonely, I asked, when there's still so much to read?

I have frequently wondered if the majority of mankind ever pause to reflect upon the occasionally titanic significance of dreams, and of the obscure world to which they belong.