Quotes About Wonder

Thankfully for us, water seems unaware of the rules of chemistry or laws of physics. Everyone

Thankfully for us, water seems unaware of the rules of chemistry or laws of physics.

J. B. S. Haldane once famously observed: "The universe is not only queerer than we suppose; it is queerer than we can suppose.

Matters were not helped, as David Bodanis points out in his superb book E = mc2, when the New York Times decided to do a story, and—for reasons that can never fail to excite wonder—sent the paper's golfing correspondent, one Henry Crouch, to conduct the interview.

In ways that we have barely begun to understand, trillions upon trillions of reflexive chemical reactions add up to a mobile, thinking, decision-making you—or, come to that, a rather less reflective but still incredibly organized dung beetle. Every living thing, never forget, is a wonder of atomic engineering.

To me that was just a miracle. That has been my position with science ever since. Excited

Look at yourself in the mirror and reflect upon the fact that you are beholding ten thousand trillion cells, and that almost every one of them holds two yards of densely compacted DNA, and you begin to appreciate just how much of this stuff you carry around with you.

in the words of Carl Sagan.

Imagine a pile of TNT about the size of Rhode Island and reaching eight miles into the sky, to about the height of the highest cirrus clouds, and you have some idea of what visitors to Yellowstone are shuffling around on top of.

The wonder of cells is not that things occasionally go wrong, but that they manage everything so smoothly for decades at a stretch.

Every living thing, never forget, is a wonder of atomic engineering. Indeed

Silbury Hill is a wonder. It is 130 feet high—about the height of a ten-story building—and is entirely made by hand. It is the tallest artificial prehistoric mound in the world. There is nothing like it anywhere else. It is covered in grass and is uniform all the way around. It is sensationally lovely to look at. It is genuinely perfect. It deserves to be world famous.

Was das Leben sonst auch sein mag, auf der Ebene der Chemie ist es erstaunlich profan: Kohlenstoff, Wasserstoff, Sauerstoff und Stickstoff, ein wenig Calcium, ein Schuss Schwefel, eine kleine Prise von ein paar anderen ganz gewöhnlichen Elementen - nichts, was man nicht in jeder normalen Apotheke finden würde -, das ist alles, was man braucht. Das einzig Besondere an den Atomen, die Sie bilden, besteht darin, dass sie Sie bilden. Und das ist natürlich das Wunder des Lebens.

Wow, look at all the places you can park," he said, as if for all these years he had been cruising endlessly, unable to terminate a journey.

Henry Gosse, produced a somewhat desperate alternative theory called "prochronism" in which he suggested that God had merely made the Earth look old, to give people of inquisitive minds more interesting things to wonder over.

I hung up again and looked at Katz. "What is it with this town? I've blown more intelligent life into a handkerchief.

It's a strange thing because nobody can say exactly where the Scottish Highlands begin and end, but there comes a moment when the world fills with clean, sparkling air and the mountains take on a kind of purply glory and you know you are there. That's what I was looking

How is it possible, in this wondrous land where the relics of genius and enterprise confront you at every step, where every realm of human possibility has been probed and challenged and meticulously extended, where many of the very greatest accomplishments of industry, commerce, and the arts find their seat—how is it possible in such a place that when at length I returned to my hotel and switched on the television, it was Cagney & Lacey again?

Australia is just so full of surprises.

I was beginning to appreciate that the central feature of life on the Appalachian Trail is deprivation, that the whole point of the experience is to remove yourself so thoroughly from the conveniences of everyday life that the most ordinary things -- processed cheese, a can of pop gorgeously beaded with condensation -- fill you with wonder and gratitude.

there. I had thought we would have

Mientras hacía este libro aprendí sobre todo dos cosas. La primera es que no existe nada, ni una sola cosa, que no sea increíble e interesante cuando te detienes a examinarla... La otra cosa que aprendí es que tenemos una suerte bárbara de estar aquí.

Wow, it really snowed last night! Isn't it wonderful? Everything familiar has disappeared! The world looks brand new! A new year ... a fresh, clean start! It's like having a big white sheet of paper to draw on! A day full of possibilities! It's a magical world, Hobbes, ol' buddy ... let's go exploring!

That's the whole problem with science. You've got a bunch of empiricists trying to describe things of unimaginable wonder.