Alife oflove is one of continualgrowth, where thedoors and windows ofexperience are always open to thewonder andmagic that life offers. To love is to risk living fully.
Thomas Carlyle,Sartor Resartus (1833–1834), Book I, Ch. 10.
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.
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 tofools and bores.
That kind of deepattention that we pay as children is something that I cherish, that I think we all can cherish and reclaim, because attention is that doorway togratitude, the doorway to wonder, the doorway toreciprocity. And it worries me greatly that today’s children can recognize 100 corporate logos and fewer than 10plants.
The core and the surface Are essentially the same Words making them seem different Only to express appearance. Ifname beneeded, 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 ornever, and was trying to remember whatit was, and hoping it wasn't anything nice...
Wonder is from surprise; and surprise ceases upon experience.
Robert South, "The Duties of the Episcopal Function", inSermons 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 thatphilosophy begins with wonder, we are affirming in effect that sentiment is prior toreason.
Richard Weaver, inIdeas have Consequences (1948), p. 19.
Philosophy is the product of wonder. The effort after the general characterization of the world around us is the romance ofhuman thought.
