Quotes About Awe

you understood why people have always looked up into the sky when talking to God. You need to feel the immensity of something very much bigger than yourself, and there it is—immeasurably vast, and always near at hand. Covering you.

In short, it stood an object of terror and delight!

If you knew they were really balls of flaming gas, you could imagine them as van Gogh saw them, without difficulty Ã¢â'¬Â¦ and looking into that illuminated void, you understood why people have always looked up into the sky when talking to God. You need to feel the immensity of something very much bigger than yourself, and there it is—immeasurably vast, and always near at hand. Covering you. Help me, I said silently. I

momento en que la luna se descubrió e

No one can help but stare at the monster, because horror is a cousin to awe.

Two things fill the mind with ever new and increasing admiration and awe...

Two things fill the mind with ever-increasing wonder and awe, the more often and the more intensely the mind of thought is drawn to them: the starry heavens above me and the moral law within me.

Two things fill the mind with ever new and increasing admiration and awe, the more often and steadily we reflect upon them: the starry heavens above me and the moral law within me. I do not seek or conjecture either of them as if they were veiled obscurities or extravagances beyond the horizon of my vision; I see them before me and connect them immediately with the consciousness of my existence.

The whole structure leans dangerously towards the miraculous.

Beauty is a call to admiration, not to action.

or else we contemplated the stars beyond the Moon, big as pieces of fruit, made of light, ripened on the curved branches of the sky, and everything exceeded my most luminous hopes ...

Al ver a veces a mi hermano perderse en un viejo nogal inmenso, como en un palacio de muchos pisos e innumerables estancias, me entraban ganas de imitarlo, de ir a vivir allá arriba; tal es la fuerza y la seguridad que ese árbol pone en ser árbol, su obstinación en ser pesado y duro, que se le nota incluso en sus hojas.

I was six when I saw that everything was God, and my hair stood up, and all.... It was on a Sunday, I remember. My sister was a tiny child then, and she was drinking her milk, and all of a sudden I saw that she was God and the milk was God. I mean, all she was doing was pouring God into God, if you know what I mean.

As he watched his flocks by Mount Horeb, he saw a bush that was blazing without being consumed. He said, "Let me check out this amazing sight and find out why the bush isn't burning up." And then, the telling sentence: "When the LORD saw that he was coming to look, God called to him out of the bush" (Ex 3:3-4). I think it

When I was a little kid - and even still - I loved magic tricks. When I saw how movies got made - at least had a glimpse when I went on the Universal Studios tour with my grandfather, I remember feeling like this was another means by which I could do magic.

Visual design proved to be a fifth wonder of life. Buildings, terra-cotta warriors in China, dams, and paintings appeared in stories of awe from around the world.

Stories of spiritual and religious awe were a sixth wonder of life. These weren't as common as you might imagine, given our perennial search for nirvana, satori, bliss, or samadhi.

These three stories of awe—the scientific, the cultural, and the personal—converge on an understanding of how we can find awe. Where do we find it? In response to what I will call the eight wonders of life, which include the strength, courage, and kindness of others; collective movement in actions like dance and sports; nature; music; art and visual design; mystical encounters; encountering life and death; and big ideas or epiphanies.

So often, vast circumstances confine us, like a life sentence in prison or tending to people who are dying, or racist immigration law, or combat, circumstances that seem to "always win." But in recognizing the vastness of such fates, that we are "a tiny speck" in a "huge place," we can find a "freeing feeling" and even an urge to build "real joy for all people." We so often experience transformative awe in the hardest of circumstances.

the "small self" effect of awe arises in all eight wonders of life, and not just vast nature. Finding awe in encounters with moral beauty, for example, or music, or when struck by big ideas, quiets the voice of that interfering and nagging neurotic.

Feeling part of something much larger than the self is music to our ears. This transformation of the self brought about by awe is a powerful antidote to the isolation and loneliness that is epidemic today.

How does awe transform us? By quieting the nagging, self-critical, overbearing, status-conscious voice of our self, or ego, and empowering us to collaborate, to open our minds to wonders, and to see the deep patterns of life.

When our default self reigns too strongly, though, and we are too focused on ourselves, anxiety, rumination, depression, and self-criticism can overtake us. An overactive default self can undermine the collaborative efforts and goodwill of our communities. Many of today's social ills arise out of an overactive default self, augmented by self-obsessed digital technologies. Awe, it would seem, quiets this urgent voice of the default self.

Institutions that embody moral beauty—universities, museums, cathedrals, courthouses, monuments, the criminal justice system—can inspire awe in those who live lives of privilege. For those who've been subjugated by such institutions, the feeling is often much closer to threat-based awe and its bodily expressions, shudders and cold shivers.