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wonder
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The
first act of awe, when a person was
struck
with the beauty or wonder of
Nature,
was the first spiritual experience.
Henryk
Skolimowski
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Awe enables us to see in the world intimations
of the divine,
to sense in small things the beginning of
infinite significance,
to sense the ultimate in the common and
the simple, to feel
in the rush of the passing the stillness
of the eternal.
Abraham Joshua Heschel
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I
was struck by the fact that I hadn't been awed in a
while. Did that mean
awesome things had disappeared from
my life? No.
What it did mean was
that
I'd gotten too
caught up in distractions and mind mucking
to recognize
anything
as awe-inspiring. . . . I hadn't been paying
attention to the beauty around me.
Sue
Patton Thoele |
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Watch for glimpses of the divine order.
Find those experiences,
sights, and sounds which fill you with
awe. Any experience
met with awe can be spiritual:
a safari through an animal
kingdom, taking in a sunset, a hike
to an awesome mountaintop.
Susan Santucci
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Gratitude bestows
reverence, allowing us to encounter everyday
epiphanies,
those transcendent moments of awe that change forever
how we
experience life and the world.
John Milton
I
stand in awe of my body.
Henry
David Thoreau
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I am mentally preparing myself for the
five-year-old mind.
I want to come down to their physical
limitations
and up to their sense of wonder and awe.
Shinichi Suzuki |
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We should, all of us, be filled with gratitude
and humility for
our present progress and prosperity. We
should be filled with
awe and joy at what lies over the
horizon. And we should be
filled with absolute determination
to make the most of it.
Bill Clinton |
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The most beautiful thing we
can experience is
the
mysterious. It is
the source
of all true art and all
science. They to whom this emotion
is a stranger, who can
no
longer pause to wonder
and stand rapt in
awe,
are as
good as dead:
their eyes are closed.
Albert Einstein
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Because philosophy arises from awe, a
philosopher is bound
in his or her way to be a lover of myths and poetic fables.
Poets and philosophers are alike in being big with wonder.
Thomas Aquinas |
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Religious
awe is the same organic thrill which
we feel in a forest at twilight, or in a mountain gorge.
William
James
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Think
with awe on the slow and quiet power of time.
Friedrich
Schiller
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Mountains
inspire awe in any human
person who has a soul. They
remind us of our frailty, our
unimportance, of the briefness
of our
span upon this earth. They
touch the heavens, and sail
serenely
at an
altitude beyond even the
imaginings of a mere mortal.
Elizabeth
Aston |
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Two things awe me most,
the starry sky above me and the moral law within me.
Immanuel Kant
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Awe
is the beginning of wisdom.
Awe is the beginning of education.
Matthew
Fox |
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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 music and
poetry
can deliver. It is truly one of the things that make
life worth living
and it does so, if anything, more effectively if it convinces
us
that the time we have for living is quite finite.
Richard Dawkins
Unweaving the Rainbow |
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What
an absolutely precious state awe is! When we are in awe,
we approach the grandeur of the knowledge of our place in the
universe. In experiencing awe, we allow the brilliance
and wisdom
of the child and the innocent to return to our awareness. . .
. When
we are filled with awe, we are at peace with the knowledge
that we
do not and cannot understand everything. A peacefulness
permeates
our being, descending upon us with this knowledge. Awe
lets us
glimpse the vastness of creation with the awareness that we
are
part of it. Awe is a knowledge that transcends
understanding. . . .
If we have trouble feeling awe, children are sometimes willing
to help us.
Anne Wilson Schaef
Meditations for Living in Balance
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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
The Pleasures and Sorrows of Work
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We must never lose our
sense of awe at the magnificence of our planet.
unattributed
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The
very act of planting a seed in the earth has in
it to me something beautiful. I always do it
with a joy that is largely mixed with awe.
Celia Laighton Thaxter
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wonder
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We teach
children how to measure and how to weigh. We
fail
to teach them how to revere, how to sense wonder and awe.
Harold Kushner
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I felt
deep within me that the highest point a person can attain is
not
Knowledge, or Virtue, or Goodness, or Victory, but something
even greater, more heroic and more despairing: Sacred
Awe!
Nikos Kazantzakis
Zorba the Greek |
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How
is it that hardly any major religion has looked at science and
concluded,
“This is better than we thought! The Universe is much
bigger than our
prophets said, grander, more subtle, more elegant?”
Instead they say,
“No, no, no! My god is a little god, and I want him to
stay that way.” A
religion, old or new, that stressed the magnificence of the
Universe as
revealed by modern science might be able to draw forth
reserves of
reverence and awe hardly tapped by the conventional faiths.
Carl Sagan
Pale Blue Dot |
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There are
in life a few moments so beautiful that
even words are a sort
of profanity.
Diana Palmer |
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We
have lived by the assumption that what was good for us
would be good for the world. And this has been based
on the even flimsier assumption that we could know
with any certainty what was good even for us. We have
fulfilled the danger of this by making our personal
pride and greed the standard of our behavior toward
the world--to the incalculable disadvantage of the
world and every living thing in it. And now, perhaps
very close to too late, our great error has become
clear. It is not only our own creativity--our own
capacity for life--that is stifled by our arrogant
assumption; the creation itself is stifled.
We have been wrong. We must change our lives, so that
it will be possible to live by the contrary assumption
that what is good for the world will be good for us.
And that requires that we make the effort to know the
world and to learn what is good for it. We must learn
to cooperate in its processes, and to yield to its
limits. But even more important, we must learn to
acknowledge that the creation is full of mystery; we
will never entirely understand it. We must abandon
arrogance and stand in awe. We must recover the sense
of the majesty of creation, and the ability to be
worshipful in its presence. For I do not doubt that it
is only on the condition of humility and reverence
before the world that our species will be able to
remain in it.
Wendell Berry
The Art of the Commonplace |
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"Awe" is just a word to
denote a quality of spirituality that cannot be
described. It's a noble emotion of wonder.
It's having your mind blown while getting a glimmer of
the unfathomableness of God. It's getting an
understanding of who you are, individually and in the
larger scheme of things. It's catching a ray of
knowing the answer to where you come from and where
you are going. Getting closer to the answers of
these questions is receiving a peek of how exalted
things are. And it's a promise of what can come.
If you believe that you feel awe, even if you're
not really sure, just concentrate on it. Awe is
an evolving feeling that becomes more profound and
more full of wonder as your spirituality becomes
focused and mature. The answers, as inarticulate
as they may be, grow with the gathering of your
spirituality. For now, feel awe if you have any
deepening convictions about your spirituality.
These convictions may be that you can come to know
yourself, that there is an eternal power that is the
All-Knowing Creative Power, that you've had an inkling
that you can come to know God. Whatever
convictions come now, love them, and when you ponder
these questions, let yourself move with the awe.
Michael
Goddart
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I
share Einstein's affirmation that anyone who is not lost in
rapturous awe at the power and glory of the mind behind
the universe "is as good as a burnt out candle."
Madeleine L'Engle |
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