I felt deep within me that the highest point a man can attain is not Knowledge, or Virtue, or Goodness, or Victory, but something even greater, more heroic and more despairing: Sacred Awe!” – The...

Rarely do wonder tales end unhappily. They triumph over death. The tale begins with “Once upon a time” or “Once there was” and never really ends when it ends. The ending is actually the beginning....

The feeling of awed wonder that science can give us is one of the highest experiences of which the human psyche is capable. It is a deep aesthetic passion to rank with the finest that...

What can we make of the inexpressible joy of children? It is a kind of gratitude, I think—the gratitude of the ten-year-old who wakes to her own energy and the brisk challenge of the world....

Oftentimes we call Life bitter names, but only when we ourselves are bitter and dark. And we deem her empty and unprofitable, but only when the soul goes wandering in desolate places, and the heart...

The world is full of magic things, patiently waiting for our senses to grow sharper.

Consciousness is our gateway to experience: It enables us to recognize Van Gogh’s starry skies, be enraptured by Beethoven’s Fifth, and stand in awe of a snowcapped mountain. Yet consciousness is subjective, personal, and famously...

…when you look at the stars, you should tremble – only dullards have become callous to this frisson …

Why not other elements besides fire, air, earth and water? There are four of them, just four, those foster parents of beings! What a pity! Why aren’t there forty elements instead, or four hundred, or...

Because philosophy arises from awe, a philosopher is bound in his way to be a lover of myths and poetic fables. Poets and philosophers are alike in being big with wonder.

Custom, that unwritten law, By which the people keep even kings in awe.

When it’s over, I want to say: all my lifeI was a bride married to amazement.I was a bridegroom, taking the world into my arms.When it’s over, I don’t want to wonderif I have made...

Love is something to be treated with awe. Or should it be aww? People don’t know my capacity for love. If you tried to bottle it up, I’m sure it would take at least three...

Zen has been called the “religion before religion,” which is to say that anyone can practice, including those committed to another faith. And that phrase evokes that natural religion of our early childhood, when heaven...

There is pride, too, though – pride that he has done it alone. That his daughter is so curious, so resilient. There is the humility of being a father to someone so powerful, as if...

Wonder isn’t about finding answers; it’s about becoming more comfortable with questions.

The prosaic fact of the universe’s existence alone defeats both the pragmatist and the romantic.

We are one knot in a great web of being, building out of the vast past and (with luck) continuing billions of years into the future, until the sun dies, the last of its energy...

There she was, the mother of me, like a lit plinth,Heavenly, though I was reared to find this kind Of visitation impractical; she was an unbearable detailOf the supreme celestial map,Of which I had been...

There are in life a few moments so beautiful,that even words are a sort of profanity.

All this he saw, for one moment breathless and intense, vivid on the morning sky; and still, as he looked, he lived; and still, as he lived, he wondered.

The most beautiful thing we can experience is the mysterious. It is the source of all true art and all science. He to whom this emotion is a stranger, who can no longer pause to...

…fjældene slutter sig tættere og tættere omkring os, det synes som om alt håp er ute, bare litt himmel er synlig ret over vore hodet. Det virker beklemmende på os, vi overvældes og tier. Pludselig...

Cinders patter, falling with the snow. We creep infinitesimally northward through the dirty chaos of a world in the process of making itself. Praise then Creation unfinished!