Wonder
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This page is for quotations upon the circumstances of wonder.
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- 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.- Laozi in the Tao Te Ching, as translated in The Way of Life, According to Laotzu (1944) by Witter Bynner
- Philosophy is the product of wonder. The effort after the general characterization of the world around us is the romance of human thought.
- Alfred North Whitehead, in Nature and Life (1934) Ch. 1
- Philosophy begins in wonder. And, at the end, when philosophic thought has done its best, the wonder remains.
- Alfred North Whitehead, in Modes of Thought (1938) Ch. 3, Lecture 7, p. 232
- 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 the beginning of wisdom.
- Plato's Socrates, in Phaedrus
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- Wonder is not a Pollyanna stance, not a denial of reality; wonder is an acknowledgment of the power of the mind to transform.
- Wonder is the basis of worship.
- This world, after all our science and sciences, is still a miracle; wonderful, inscrutable, magical and more, to whosoever will think of it.
- 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.
- It is a wholesome and necessary thing for us to turn again to the earth and in the contemplation of her beauties to know of wonder and humility.
- If a child is to keep alive his inborn sense of wonder, 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 wonderful fact to reflect upon, that every human creature is constituted to be that profound secret and mystery to every other.
- Wonder is music heard in the heart, is voiceless.
- It just ain't possible to explain some things. It's interesting to wonder on them and do some speculation, but the main thing is you have to accept it — take it for what it is, and get on with your growing.
- A man is a very small thing, and the night is very large and full of wonders.
- The most interesting thing in the world is another human being who wonders, suffers and raises the questions that have bothered him to the last day of his life, knowing he will never get the answers.
- 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 wonder and stand rapt in awe, is as good as dead: his eyes are closed.
- 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.
- The wonder is, not that the field of stars is so vast, but that man has measured it
- I can hardly keep wondering at my own folly in thinking it worthwhile to leave my books and garden, even for one day's attendance in the House of Commons.
- Wonder rather than doubt is the root of knowledge.
- Wonder, connected with a principle of rational curiosity, is the source of all knowledge and discover, and it is a principle even of piety; but wonder which ends in wonder, and is satisfied with wonder, is the quality of an idiot.
- All wonder is the effect of novelty on ignorance.
- The fey wonders of the world only exist while there are those with the sight to see them.
- Wondering's healthy. Broadens the mind. Opens you up to all sorts of stray thoughts and possibilities.
- Wonder is the foundation of all philosophy, inquiry the progress, ignorance the end.
- The possession of knowledge does not kill the sense of wonder and mystery. There is always more mystery.
- Love is the joy of the good, the wonder of the wise, the amazement of the Gods.
- We need a renaissance of wonder. We need to renew, in our hearts and in our souls, the deathless dream, the eternal poetry, the perennial sense that life is miracle and magic.
- Wonder is involuntary praise.
