Wonder
is an
emotion
comparable to surprise that people feel when perceiving something rare, unexpected, or puzzling to their conceptions.
- Wonder is the basis of worship.
- In these troubled times it is a wholesome and necessary thing for us to turn again to the earth and in the contemplation of her beauties to know the sense of wonder and humility.
- Rachel Carson
"The Exceeding Beauty of the World" (Words to Live by),
This Week
(1952), quoted in Karen F. Stein,
Rachel Carson: Challenging Authors
(Rotterdam: Sense Publishers, 2012), p. 54.
- If I had influence with the good fairy who is supposed to preside over the christening of all children I should ask that her gift to each child in the world be a sense of wonder so indestructible that it would last throughout life as an unfailing antidote against the boredom and disenchantments of later years.
- If a child is to keep alive his inborn sense of wonder without any such gift from the fairies, he needs the companionship of at least one adult who can share it, rediscovering with him the joy, excitement and mystery of the world we live in.
- A man is a small thing and the night is very large and full of wonders.
- Lord Dunsany
,
The Laughter of the Gods
, Act II, in
Plays of Gods and Men
(Boston: John W. Luce & Company, 1917), p. 102
- May the
people
marvel admiringly, and may
Utu
witness it in
joy
.
- Genius
goes around the world in its youth incessantly apologizing for having large feet. What wonder that later in life it should be inclined to raise those feet too swiftly to
fools
and bores.
- That kind of deep
attention
that we pay as children is something that I cherish, that I think we all can cherish and reclaim, because attention is that doorway to
gratitude
, the doorway to wonder, the doorway to
reciprocity
. And it worries me greatly that today’s children can recognize 100 corporate logos and fewer than 10
plants
.
- The core and the surface
Are essentially the same
Words
making them seem different
Only to express appearance.
If
name
be
needed
, wonder names them both:
From wonder into wonder existence opens.
- The Piglet was sitting on the ground at the door of his house blowing happily at a dandelion, and wondering whether it would be this year, next year, sometime or
never
, and was trying to remember what
it
was, and hoping it wasn't anything nice...
- The possession of knowledge does not kill the sense of wonder and mystery. There is always more mystery.
- Anais Nin
,
The Diary of Anais Nin, Vol. 1: 1931?1934
, ed. Gunther Stuhlmann (1966).
- Wonder is the beginning of
wisdom
.
- Wonder is from surprise; and surprise ceases upon experience.
- Robert South
, "The Duties of the Episcopal Function", in
Sermons Preached upon Several Occasions
(Philadelphia: Sorin & Ball, 1844), Vol. 1, p. 75.
- Wonder is not a disease.
Wonder, and its expression in poetry and the arts, are among the most important things which seem to distinguish men from other animals, and intelligent and sensitive people from morons.
- Alan Watts
, in "The Book on the Taboo Against Knowing Who You Are" (1966).
- When we affirm that
philosophy
begins with wonder, we are affirming in effect that sentiment is prior to
reason
.
- Philosophy
is the product of wonder.
The effort after the general characterization of the world around us is the romance of
human
thought.
- Philosophy begins in wonder. And, at the end, when philosophic thought has done its best, the wonder remains.
- Man
has to awaken to wonder ? and so perhaps do peoples.
Science
is a way of sending him to sleep again.
- Ludwig Wittgenstein
, notes from 1930, in
Culture and Value
(1984), translated by Peter Winch, p. 5.
- Wonder is involuntary praise.