Quotes About Awe

He stretched out his arms toward the sun and prayed in a tongue no villager could understand; though indeed the villagers did not try very hard to understand, since their attention was mostly taken up by the sky and the odd shapes the clouds were assuming.

H.P. Lovecraft

It is man's relation to the cosmos—to the unknown—which alone arouses in me the spark of creative imagination. . . . —H. P. LOVECRAFT2

What I had thought morbid and shameful and ignominious is in reality awesome and mind-expanding and even glorious--my previous estimate being merely a phase of man's eternal tendency to hate and fear and shrink from the utterly different.

Ultimate horror often paralyzes memory in a merciful way.

Awestruck at this unexpected glimpse into a past beyond the conception of the most daring anthropologist, I stood musing whilst the moon cast queer reflections on the silent channel before me.

H.P. Lovecraft

earth or sky, no hearer was ever able to place. A single lightning-bolt shot from the purple zenith to the altar-stone, and a great tidal wave of viewless force and indescribable stench swept down from the hill to all the countryside.

All the objects—organic and inorganic alike—were totally beyond description or even comprehension. Gilman sometimes compared the inorganic masses to prisms, labyrinths, clusters of cubes and planes, and Cyclopean buildings; and the organic things struck him variously as groups of bubbles, octopi, centipedes, living Hindoo idols, and intricate Arabesques roused into a kind of ophidian animation.

Natalie had what I'd call a slow beauty, the kind you don't really notice at first and then it knocks you back and grows on you and she gets more beautiful every time you see her and then you can't believe that you ever thought that she was anything less than completely stunning. Whenever I saw her, my entire body reacted, as though it were the first time or better.

Maya had one of those sudden "pow" moments sneak up on her, the ones all parents experience, when you are simply overwhelmed by your love for your child, when you are awestruck and you can feel something rising inside of you and you just want to hold onto it and yet, at the same time, that caring, that fear of losing this person, scares you into near paralysis. How, you wonder, will you ever relax again, knowing how unsafe the world is? Lily

Cingle was six feet tall with blue eyes and honey-colored hair. Her face was fairly attractive. Her body caused heart arrhythmia—a total, no-let-up traffic-stopper.

Rocco was the kind of gigantic it was hard to fathom, so that each time you saw him, you were struck anew by the sheer size of him. When he strolled around Cornelius's apartment, Simon half expected to hear fee-fie-fo-fum à la "Jack and the Beanstalk.

With this sense of the splendour of our experience and of its awful brevity, gathering all we are into one desperate effort to see and touch, we shall hardly have time to make theories about the things we see and touch.

Any time they try to describe the tsunami to us, I am so touched by how high they look in the air, when they explain it with their hands-they go so high.

Seeing my daughter for the first time after I came back from the tour was just a life-changing experience... it still blows my mind.

Every time I look at the Eiffel Tower, it completely blows my mind.

I've seen several funnel clouds as a kid, too. They're cool if, you know, they're, like, two towns over, but they're scary as hell if you know they're coming your way.

Is it only humans that look up with wonder at the stars and the vastness of the universe?

I didn't know that the world could be so mind-blowingly beautiful.

Stuff your eyes with wonder.

Much have I traveled in the realms of gold, and many goodly states and kingdoms seen.

It is good to renew one's wonder, said the philosopher. Space travel has again made children of us all.

People travel to marvel at the mountains, seas, rivers and stars and they pass right by themselves without astonishment.