#wonder

It doesn't stop being magic just because you know how it works. ↗

— Terry Pratchett

#wonder #men

My day is done, and I am like a boat drawn on the beach, listening to the dance-music of the tide in the evening. ↗

— Rabindranath Tagore

#endings #evening #reverence #wonder #music

Every spring is the only spring, a perpetual astonishment! ↗

— Ellis Peters

#nature #wonder #nature

There are many going afar to marvel at the heights of mountains, the mighty waves of the sea, the long courses of great rivers, the vastness of the ocean, the movements of the stars, yet they leave themselves unnoticed! ↗

— Augustine of Hippo

#marveling #nature #self #wonders #nature

Think of how many religions attempt to validate themselves with prophecy. Think of how many people rely on these prophecies, however vague, however unfulfilled, to support or prop up their beliefs. Yet has there ever been a religion with the prophetic accuracy and reliability of science? ... No other human institution comes close. ↗

— Carl Sagan

#reason #science #science-vs-religion #scientific-method #sense-of-wonder

For thousands of years, it had been nature--and its supposed creator--that had had a monopoly on awe. It had been the icecaps, the deserts, the volcanoes and the glaciers that had given us a sense of finitude and limitation and had elicited a feeling in which fear and respect coagulated into a strangely pleasing feeling of humility, a feeling which the philosophers of the eighteenth century had famously termed the sublime. But then had come a transformation to which we were still the heirs.... Over the course of the nineteenth century, the dominant catalyst for that feeling of the sublime had ceased to be nature. We were now deep in the era of the technological sublime, when awe could most powerfully be invoked not by forests or icebergs but by supercomputers, rockets and particle accelerators. We were now almost exclusively amazed by ourselves. ↗

— Alain de Botton

#humility #nature #sublime #technology #wonder

Occasionally she glanced at him, asking with her glance, 'Is this what I think?' "I understand,' she said, blushing. "What is this word?' he said, pointing to the "n' that signified the word "never." .... She wrote: t, I, c,g,n,o,a. ↗

— Leo Tolstoy

#romantic

We are going to die, and that makes us the lucky ones. Most people are never going to die because they are never going to be born. The potential people who could have been here in my place but who will in fact never see the light of day outnumber the sand grains of Arabia. Certainly those unborn ghosts include greater poets than Keats, scientists greater than Newton. We know this because the set of possible people allowed by our DNA so massively exceeds the set of actual people. In the teeth of these stupefying odds it is you and I, in our ordinariness, that are here.We privileged few, who won the lottery of birth against all odds, how dare we whine at our inevitable return to that prior state from which the vast majority have never stirred? ↗

— Richard Dawkins

#inspirational #science #wonder #death

Science is not only compatible with spirituality; it is a profound source of spirituality. ↗

— Carl Sagan

#philosophy #science #sense-of-wonder #spirituality #science

Wisdom may begin in wonder, however, it inevitability ends in righteousness (Socrates)." ~R. Alan Woods [2013] ↗

— R. Alan Woods

#righteousness #socrates #wisdom #wonders #r-alan-woods