A belief in Wonder
A sense of wonder opens our hearts and minds to fresh perspectives and new possibilities.
Quotations
“Art and Spirit”
And whatever we mean by the word ‘spirit’ – let us just say, with Tillich, that it involves for each of us our ultimate concern – it is in that simple awestruck moment when great art enters you and changes you, that spirit shines in this world just a little more brightly than it did the moment before.
Ken Wilber, from the book The Eye of Spirit: An Integral Vision for a World Gone Slightly Mad, 1997, © Ken Wilber
“Bathing in mystery and confusion”
I don’t mean to suggest that we have the final answers; we are bathing in mystery and confusion on many subjects, and I think that will always be our destiny. The universe will always be much richer than our ability to understand it.
Carl Sagan, from the book Conversations with Carl Sagan, 1980
“A burst of astonishment at our own existence”
No man knows how much he is an optimist, even when he calls himself a pessimist, because he has not really measured the depths of his debt to whatever created him and enabled him to call himself anything. At the back of our brains… [there is] a forgotten blaze or burst of astonishment at our own existence. The object of the artistic and spiritual life [is] to dig for this submerged sunrise of wonder; so that a man sitting in a chair might suddenly understand that he [is] actually alive, and be happy.
“Competition is not separable from endless flavors of cooperation”
Her trees are far more social than even Patricia suspected. There are no individuals. There aren’t even separate species. Everything in the forest is the forest. Competition is not separable from endless flavors of cooperation. Trees fight no more than do the leaves on a single tree. It seems most of nature isn’t red in tooth and claw, after all. For one, those species at the base of the living pyramid have neither teeth nor talons. But if trees share their storehouses, then every drop of red must float on a sea of green.
Richard Powers, from the book The Overstory, 2018, © Richard Powers
“Dreams Come True”
Dreams come true. Without that possibility, nature would not incite us to have them.
John Updike, from Self-Consciousness: Memoirs, 1989
“Finish every day and be done with it”
Finish every day and be done with it. For manners and for wise living it is a vice to remember. You have done what you could; some blunders and absurdities no doubt crept in: forget them as fast as you can. Tomorrow is a new day. You shall begin it well and serenely, and with too high a spirit to be cumbered with your old nonsense. This day for all that is good and fair. It is too dear, with its hopes and invitations, to waste a moment on the rotten yesterdays.
Ralph Waldo Emerson, from the letter “To Daughter Ellen”, 8 Apr 1854
“The Golden Eternity”
I have lots of things to teach you now, in case we ever meet, concerning the message that was transmitted to me under a pine tree in North Carolina on a cold winter moonlit night. It said that Nothing Ever Happened, so don’t worry. It’s all like a dream. Everything is ecstasy, inside. We just don’t know it because of our thinking-minds. But in our true blissful essence of mind is known that everything is alright forever and forever and forever. Close your eyes, let your hands and nerve-ends drop, stop breathing for 3 seconds, listen to the silence inside the illusion of the world, and you will remember the lesson you forgot, which was taught in immense milky way soft cloud innumerable worlds long ago and not even at all. It is all one vast awakened thing. I call it the golden eternity. It is perfect.
Jack Kerouac, from the letter “The Portable Jack Kerouac”, 1957
“The Half-Finished Heaven”
Despondency breaks off its course.
Anguish breaks off its course.
The vulture breaks off its flight.The eager light streams out,
even the ghosts take a draught.And our paintings see daylight,
our red beasts of the ice-age studios.Everything begins to look around.
We walk in the sun in hundreds.Each man is a half-open door
leading to a room for everyone.The endless ground under us.
The water is shining among the trees.
The lake is a window into the earth.
Tomas Tranströmer, from the poem “The Half-Finished Heaven”, 1997
“A mind is blown”
A mind is blown when something you always feared but knew to be impossible turns out to be true; when the world turns out far vaster, far more marvelous or malevolent than you ever dreamed; when you get proof that everything is connected to everything else, that everything you know is wrong, that you are both the center of the universe and a tiny speck sailing off its nethermost edge.
Michael Chabon, from the speech “Keynote at Eisner Awards”, 2004
“A miraculous world”
What was wonderful about childhood is that anything in it was a wonder. It was not merely a world full of miracles; it was a miraculous world.
“The Mysterious”
The most beautiful experience we can have is the mysterious. It is the fundamental emotion that stands at the cradle of true art and true science. Whoever does not know it and can no longer wonder, no longer marvel, is as good as dead, and his eyes are dimmed. It was the experience of mystery – even if mixed with fear – that engendered religion. A knowledge of the existence of something we cannot penetrate, our perceptions of the profoundest reason and the most radiant beauty, which only in their most primitive forms are accessible to our minds: it is this knowledge and this emotion that constitute true religiosity. In this sense, and only this sense, I am a deeply religious man.
Albert Einstein, from the book The World As I See It, 1949
“Mysticism has kept men sane”
The truth is that Tolstoy, with his immense genius, with his colossal faith, with his vast fearlessness and vast knowledge of life, is deficient in one faculty and one faculty alone. He is not a mystic; and therefore he has a tendency to go mad. Men talk of the extravagances and frenzies that have been produced by mysticism; they are a mere drop in the bucket. In the main, and from the beginning of time, mysticism has kept men sane. The thing that has driven them mad was logic. …The only thing that has kept the race of men from the mad extremes of the convent and the pirate-galley, the night-club and the lethal chamber, has been mysticism– the belief that logic is misleading, and that things are not what they seem.
G. K. Chesterton, from Tolstoy, 1903
“Nature transcends our tendencies to label and classify”
If you’re picking colors based on a Pantone book, you’re limited to a certain number of choices. If you step out in nature, the palette is infinite. Each rock has such a variation of color within it, we could never find a can of paint to mimic the exact same shade.
Nature transcends our tendencies to label and classify, to reduce and limit. The natural world is unfathomably more rich, interwoven, and complicated than we are taught, and so much more mysterious and beautiful.
Rick Rubin, from the book The Creative Act: A Way of Being, 2023
“The original naiveté”
You study, you learn, but you guard the original naiveté. It has to be within you, as desire for drink is within the drunkard or love is within the lover.
Henri Matisse, from the article “Time Magazine”, Feb 18, 2017
“Start with romance and build to a reality”
I think it’s part of the nature of man to start with romance and build to a reality. There’s hardly a scientist or an astronaut I’ve met who wasn’t beholden to some romantic before him who led him to doing something in life.
Ray Bradbury, from the book Mars and the Mind of Man, 12 Nov 1971
“A strange magic in human-made things”
There can be a strange magic in human-made things. Not in all of them: not in plastic bottles or Q-Tips or batteries; but in those that are interwoven with our pasts, with our homes, with our great loves. These are things that have been mysteriously imbued with humanity — our own or other people’s.
J. K. Rowling, from the article “J. K. Rowling on the Magic of 'Things'”, 24 Dec 2021
“This dazed and dramatic ignorance”
One of the deepest and strangest of all human moods is the mood which will suddenly strike us perhaps in a garden at night, or deep in sloping meadows, the feeling that every flower and leaf has just uttered something stupendously direct and important, and that we have by a prodigy of imbecility not heard or understood it. There is a certain poetic value, and that a genuine one, in this sense of having missed the full meaning of things. There is beauty, not only in wisdom, but in this dazed and dramatic ignorance.
G. K. Chesterton, from Robert Browning., 1903
“This Highest Kind of Religious Feeling”
The beginnings of cosmic religious feeling already appear at an early stage of development, e.g., in many of the Psalms of David and in some of the Prophets. Buddhism, as we have learned especially from the wonderful writings of Schopenhauer, contains a much stronger element of this. The religious geniuses of all ages have been distinguished by this kind of religious feeling, which knows no dogma and no God conceived in man’s image; so that there can be no church whose central teachings are based on it. Hence it is precisely among the heretics of every age that we find men who were filled with this highest kind of religious feeling and were in many cases regarded by their contemporaries as atheists, sometimes also as saints.
Albert Einstein, from the book Religion and Science, 1930
“This strange hankering for play and surprise”
That exploratory, expansive drive is what separates delight from demand: when we are in play mode, we are open to new surprises, while our base appetites focus the mind on the urgent needs of staying alive. Understanding that distinction is critical to understanding why play – despite its seemingly frivolous veneer – has led to so many important discoveries and innovations. The question of why the Home sapiens brain possesses this strange hankering for play and surprise is a fascinating one….
Steven Johnson, from the book Wonderland: How Play Made the Modern World, 2016, © Steven Johnson and Nutopia Ltd.
“To see a world in a grain of sand”
To see a world in a grain of sand
And heaven in a wild flower
Hold infinity in the palm of your hand
And eternity in an hour.
William Blake, from the book The Portable William Blake, Public Domain William Blake
“The universe is queerer than we can suppose”
Now, my own suspicion is that the universe is not only queerer than we suppose, but queerer than we can suppose.
J. B. S. Haldane, from the book Possible Worlds and Other Essays, 1927
“We are in Eden still”
There runs a strange law through the length of human history – that men are continually tending to undervalue their environment, to undervalue their happiness, to undervalue themselves. The great sin of mankind, the sin typified by the fall of Adam, is the tendency, not towards pride, but towards this weird and horrible humility.
This is the great fall, the fall by which the fish forgets the sea, the ox forgets the meadow, the clerk forgets the city, every man forgets his environment and, in the fullest and most literal sense, forgets himself. This is the real fall of Adam, and it is a spiritual fall. It is a strange thing that many truly spiritual men, such as General Gordon, have actually spent some hours in speculating upon the precise location of the Garden of Eden. Most probably we are in Eden still. It is only our eyes that have changed.
“We shall see the sky sparkling with diamonds”
We shall find peace. We shall hear the angels, we shall see the sky sparkling with diamonds.
Anton Chekhov, from the play Uncle Vanya, 1897
“Wonderment is the first passion of all”
When our first encounter with some object takes us by surprise, and we judge it to be new, or very different from what we have previously experienced or from what we expected it to be, this causes us to wonder at it and be astonished. And because this can happen before we have any knowledge of whether the thing is beneficial to us or not, it seems to me that wonderment is the first passion of all. And it has no contrary, because, if the object that presents itself has nothing in itself to surprise us, we are not moved by it in any way and we consider it without any passion.
René Descartes, from the book The Passions of the Soul, 1649
“The wonder remains”
Philosophy begins in wonder. And, at the end, when philosophic thought has done its best, the wonder remains.
Alfred North Whitehead, from the book Modes of Thought, 1938
“The World is a Wonderfully Weird Place”
The world is a wonderfully weird place, consensual reality is significantly flawed, no institution can be trusted, certainty is a mirage, security a delusion, and the tyranny of the dull mind forever threatens – but our lives are not as limited as we think they are, all things are possible, laughter is holier than piety, freedom is sweeter than fame, and in the end it’s love and love alone that really matters.
Tom Robbins, from the interview “Gracie Goes to Schooner School”, 2007