Quotes About Awe

when Marilyn had leaned over his desk and kissed him, this beautiful honey-haired girl, when she came into his arms and then into his bed, James could not quite believe it. The first afternoon they'd spent together, in his tiny whitewashed studio apartment, he marveled at how her body fit so perfectly against his: her nose nestled exactly into the hollow between his collarbones; her cheek curved to match the side of his neck. As if they were two halves of a mold.

Her brother himself stood silent, awed and grateful, 1981 glistening in his eyes like a beautiful far-off star, and something wobbled inside Lydia and tumbled into her chest with a clang.

La sorpresa es el móvil de cada descubrimiento.

The surest, and the quickest, way for us to arouse the sense of wonder is to stare, unafraid, at a single object. Suddenly—miraculously—it will look like something we have never seen before.

I live only in the moment in this strange, unmortal space, crowded with beauty, pierced with danger.

He took a deep drag and looked up into the cold night sky and saw a sea of stars above him. He knew nothing about constellations or astronomy, but he enjoyed the beautiful sight. In Paris, he had never even noticed the night sky, but out in the country it was immense, almost drawing you up into the heavens. One couldn't help but be awed by the sight. As he smoked, he continued to stare at the sky, marveling at the vast number and configurations of stars.

Life is a beautiful magnificent thing, even to a jellyfish.

Before falling to the ground, the rain has touched the sky. (Avant de tomber au sol, La pluie a touché le ciel)

It was grand to see how the wind awoke, and bent the trees, and drove the rain before it like a cloud of smoke; and to hear the solemn thunder and to see the lightning; and while thinking with awe of the tremendous powers by which our little lives are encompassed, to consider how beneficent they are and how upon the smallest flower and leaf there was already a freshness poured from all this seeming rage which seemed to make creation new again.

The most beautiful thing we can experience is the mysterious. It is the source of all true art and science. He to whom this emotion is a stranger, who can no longer pause to wonder and stand rapt in awe, is as good as dead: his eyes are closed.

There was a crash of thunder, the sky shattering right above our heads.

Have you ever heard anything more beautiful... than soul-shaking booming thunder filling the width and depth and height saturating with stunning sound the infinite and electrified sky?

I believe a leaf of grass is no less than the journey-work of the stars, And the pismire is equally perfect, and a grain of sand, and the egg of the wren, And the tree-toad is a chef-d'Å"uvre for the highest, And the running blackberry would adorn the parlors of heaven, And the narrowest hinge in my hand puts to scorn all machinery, And the cow crunching with depress'd head surpasses any statue, And a mouse is miracle enough to stagger sextillions of infidels.

Philosophy begins in wonder. And, at the end, when philosophic thought has done its best, the wonder remains. There have been added, however, some grasp of the immensity of things, some purification of emotion by understanding.

Maps are a way of organizing wonder.

...my candle to the Milky Way...

From horizon to horizon the sky was filled with stars to within a few degrees of a fresh sliver of moon, a tiny thing lost in the yawn of night.

It is one thing to speak of embracing the new, the fresh, the strange. It is another to feel that one is an insect, crawling across a page of the Encyclopedia Britannica, knowing only that something vast is passing by beneath, all without your sensing more than a yawning vacancy.

Here is what we seek: a compassion that can stand in awe at what the poor have to carry rather than stand in judgment at how they carry it.

Je buvais à pleins verres les étoiles

Fear, like love, can become a call into consciousness; one meets the unconscious, the unknown, the numinous and uncontrollable by keeping in touch with fear, which elevates the blind instinctual panic of the sheep into the knowing, cunning, fearful awe of the shepherd.

When you look at everything as though you were seeing it either for the first or last time. You realize every moment in life is a miracle.

And then a rocket sprang and bang shot blind and O! then the Roman candle burst and it was like a sigh of O! and everyone cried O!O! in raptures and it gushed out of it a stream of rain gold hair threads and they shed and ah! they were all greeny dewy stars falling with golden, O so lively! O so soft, sweet, soft!

God and the Blessed Virgin were too far from him: God was too great and stern and the Blessed Virgin too pure and holy.