Quotes About Wonder

I have seen the Virgin in an appletree at Chartres And Saint Joan burn at the Bella Union. I have seen giraffes in junglejims their necks like love wound around the iron circumstances of the world. I have seen the Venus Aphrodite armless in her drafty corridor. I have heard a siren sing at One Fifth Avenue. I have seen the White Goddess dancing in the Rue des Beaux Arts on the Fourteenth of July and the Beautiful Dame Without Mercy picking her nose in Chumley's.

Again and again we trade infinite wonder for a handful of statue; we barter the limitless Nothing for the short-term bird in the hand. And when the deal is done, we have become what we serve: things rather than children of light.

But for ten minutes I'd been transported somewhere else. Andy's room. A world where toys lived. Had feelings. Had problems. I had no idea who was behind it all, but somewhere in this building there were magicians at work.

Of course, supernatural acts are what miracles are all about. They are, after all, precisely those things that circumvent the laws of nature. A god who can create the laws of nature can presumably also circumvent them at will. Although why they would have been circumvented so liberally thousands of years ago, before the invention of modern communication instruments that could have recorded them, and not today, is still something to wonder about.

I don't mind not knowing. It doesn't scare me. —RICHARD FEYNMAN

In every generation until mine, most of humanity lived with the night sky. As people began moving into cities and using more illumination, the sky gradually disappeared. There must be a corresponding loss of wonder without the stars to remind us where we stand in creation.

No man had ever heard a nightingale, When once a keen-eyed naturalist was stirred To study and define -- what is a bird.

God is in his Heaven and the first night was a wow.

Living, being in the world, was a much greater and stranger thing than she had ever dreamed.

Don't wonder about right and wrong. Those are weapons as deadly as bombs and bullets. Right is the goodness you carry in your heart—love for your ancestors and your baby and your family and for everything that lives. Wrong is anything that comes between you and that love.

Sifting through the sieve of branches, a dusting of sugar over the cereal of dead leaves. An inch of snow accumulated through the night: slow, slow confectioners' sugar coming down through the thick limbs of fir and maple and oak.

I don't have to wonder where he he, what he's doing, or who. I don't have to worry about all the ways he'll scar my son. I don't have to watch myself give in again and again, audience to my own relentless weakness. I thought if he were gone I wouldn't hate myself so much, which isn't true, as it turns out, but still his absence is as close as I can get to freedom. There's a certain clearheadedness now, there's a kind of lonely clarity--

After you turn on, don't spend the rest of your life contemplating the inner wonders. Begin immediately expressing your revelation in acts of beauty.

Growing up closes so many doors. The modern world doesn't allow for miracles, so we don't see them. It's a very precious gift, an open mind, but it's not passive. You've got to nurture it like a bed of roses; otherwise it will wither and die. Make sure you don't close off your mind to things you find strange. Sometimes they may be the only truth.

There's a feeling I get when I look to the west, And my spirit is crying for leaving. In my thoughts I have seen rings of smoke through the trees, And the voices of those who standing looking. Ooh, it makes me wonder, Ooh, it really makes me wonder.

These are the seasons of emotion And like the wind, they rise and fall This is the wonder of devotion I see the torch We all must hold This is the mystery of the quotient, quotient Upon us all, upon us all a little rain must fall

May you learn to appreciate the magic of a firefly and the majesty of a mountain.

If I ever get to 100, I'd want to be filled with wonder and wild, adolescent, wide-eyed interest in newness. So let's keep the flame burning. Let's stop thinking everyone over 29, or 49, has to be reinforced by concrete.

When first we pay the price of wisdom With innocence, We are too shocked to understand. Then later must we sit and wonder Whether it was worth the cost To know what every one must some day know. And knowing, ever after be afraid, And filled with shame.

Let me say something about that word: miracle. For too long it's been used to characterize things or events that, though pleasant, are entirely normal. Peeping chicks at Easter time, spring generally, a clear sunrise after an overcast week--a miracle, people say, as if they've been educated from greeting cards.

Mother Nature is not beneficent. She is not maleficent either of course. Merely augustly, majestically capricious.

Miracles are like meatballs, because nobody can exactly agree on what they are made of, where they come from, or how often they should appear.

Morning is one of the best times for thinking. When one has just woken up, but hasn't yet gotten out of bed, it is a perfect time to look up at the ceiling, consider one's life, and wonder what the future will hold.

I have seen many amazing things in my long and troubled life history. I have seen a series of corridors built entirely out of human skulls. I have seen a volcano erupt and send a wall of lava crawling towards a small village. I have seen a women I loved picked up by an enormous eagle and flown to its high mountain next. But I still cannot imagine what it was like to watch Aunt Josephine's house topple into Lake Lachrymose.