Quotes About Awe

You should have seen the wave go to pieces and scatter! This was a finer sight than the other one.

there was my eclipse beginning! The life went boiling through my veins; I was a new man! The rim of black spread slowly into the sun's disk, my heart beat higher and higher, and still the assemblage and the priest stared into the sky, motionless. I knew that this gaze would be turned upon me, next. When it was, I was ready. I was in one of the most grand attitudes I ever struck, with my arm stretched up pointing to the sun.

it was borne in upon me that I was standing in the awful presence of the Mother of the German Language.

The stranger's first feeling, when suddenly confronted by that towering and awful apparition wrapped in its shroud of snow, is breath-taking astonishment. It is as if heaven's gates had swung open and exposed the throne. (Twain on seeing the Jungfrau.)

Find a sky so full of stars it will blind you again

From a Himmel Street window, he wrote, the stars set fire to my eyes.

The stars set fire to my eyes.

The yawn of a girl can be so beautiful it makes you cringe.

The stars are so big, The Earth is so small, Stay as you are.

This ground itself needs to be properly accounted for by that for which it accounts, that is, by the causation through the supremely original matter – and that is the cause as causa sui. This is the right name for the god of philosophy. Man can neither pray nor sacrifice to this god. Before the causa sui, man can neither fall to his knees in awe nor can he play music and dance before this god.

I have always been a spectator of life, you know, never a participant. Never. But now I am. Today I am, and I an awed and deliriously happy. This is the adventure I asked for, the adventure I am having I will be forever grateful to you.

Omne ignotum pro magnifico17

To me, he seemed to see the sap bleeding from the trunks of the pine trees, and the circle of brightness in the sky where the sun was smothered by clouds.

This was one place where I knew I had found something worthy of awe.

There would be the light of the snow. And then this incredible crescendo of birds.

Awe, I discovered, was my favorite feeling. It was a rare experience, but when it happened, it was like an orgasm for the mind.

The past was at all times within reach, a nearly religious awe aimed in its direction. This was especially true in Egypt, which had a passion for history, and which for two millennia already had kept a written record.

It's so beautiful. Spinner stared at the eagle wings of the Nebula, drinking in its pale colors. Louise, I'm so lucky to be here, to see this. Uvarov might have sent someone else through the Locks, that first time; not me and Arrow Maker. You might have asked someone else to learn to run your nightfighter for you - and not me. Louise, I might have missed this. I might have died without seeing it - without ever knowing it existed.

if something is so far beyond your imagination, it's hard even to fear it.

The maddened four men followed frantically, for it is better to be in the presence of the awful than only within hearing. (The Black Dog)

Which of us can't honestly almost sob with joy when spring happens? You see that once again these leaves are being pushed out of dead branches, and blossoms, and insects are flying towards them is this fantastic process going on. And somehow we've allowed ourselves to feel outside it as if we are special. We've given ourselves a god like status, which is very dangerous I think, and very foolish.

He had just reached the pavement and gave now the smallest, quickest of glances back up the hill, in our direction. Our eyes didn't meet, but I saw that he was even more beautiful than I had supposed. Even more beautiful than I had ever imagined it was possible to imagine imagining beauty. Beautiful in a way that made me realise that I had never even known before what beautiful really meant: not in people, nature, taste or sound.

We have this one life to appreciate the grand design of the universe, and for that I am extremely grateful.

remember to look up at the stars