quotes about Astonishment
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I sometimes think that the universe is a machine designed for the perpetual astonishment of astronomers.
-- Arthur C. ClarkeSource : "Mysterious World (Strange Skies)". TV Series, November 18, 1980.
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The way to do research is to attack the facts at the point of greatest astonishment.
-- Celia GreenSource : The Decline and Fall of Science Aphorisms (p. 1)
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That which is not slightly distorted lacks sensible appeal; from which it follows that irregularity – that is to say, the unexpected, surprise and astonishment, are a essential part and characteristic of beauty.
-- Charles Baudelaire -
Attention, if sudden and close, graduates into surprise; and this into astonishment; and this into stupefied amazement.
-- Charles Darwin -
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Someone once wrote that a novel should deliver a series of small astonishments. I get the same thing spending an hour with you.
-- E. LockhartSource : E. Lockhart (2014). “We Were Liars”, p.46, Delacorte Press
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At first he was very discouraging, to my astonishment then, but now I fancy he did it as a forlorn hope to check me; he said the whole idea was so disgusting that he could not entertain it for a moment.
-- Elizabeth Garrett Anderson -
I shall continue to explore-the astonishment of living.
-- Enid BagnoldSource : Enid Bagnold (1970). “Four plays”
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Explanation separates us from astonishment, which is the only gateway to the incomprehensible.
-- Eugene Ionesco -
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Each individual fact, taken by itself, can indeed arouse our curiosity or our astonishment, or be useful to us in its practical applications.
-- Hermann von HelmholtzSource : Hermann von Helmholtz, David Cahan (1995). “Science and Culture: Popular and Philosophical Essays”, p.97, University of Chicago Press
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One day, to everyone’s astonishment, someone drops a match in the powder keg and everything blows up.
-- James A. Baldwin -
A lot of what I am looking for is a moment of astonishment, he says. Those moments of pure consciousness when you involuntarily inhale and say 'Wow!'
-- Joel MeyerowitzSource : "Joel Meyerowitz: 'brilliant mistakes ... amazing accidents'". Interview with Sean O'Hagan, www.theguardian.com. November 10, 2012.
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I don't know about you, but I practice a disorganized religion. I belong to an unholy disorder. We call ourselves "Our Lady of the Perpetual Astonishment
-- Kurt Vonnegut -
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Science is founded on uncertainty. Each time we learn something new and surprising, the astonishment comes with the realization that we were wrong before.
-- Lewis Thomas -
In extraordinary events ignorance of their causes produces astonishment.
-- Marcus Tullius Cicero -
I must be informed, that one of my great duties was, to obey the priests in all things; and this I soon learnt, to my utter astonishment and horror, was to live in the practice of criminal intercourse with them.
-- Maria MonkSource : Maria MONK, William MONK (pseud?.), Rev. J. J. SLOCUM (1837). “Awful Disclosures ... Second edition, revised by the Rev. J. J. Slocum”, p.47
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The politics of surprise leads through the Gates of Astonishment into the Kingdom of Hope.
-- Max Lerner -
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Frederick Buechner brings the reader to his knees, sometimes in laughter, sometimes in an astonishment very close to prayer, and at the best of times in a combination of both.
-- Michael Mewshaw -
There’s nothing better than discovering, to your own astonishment, what you’re meant to do. It’s like falling in love.
-- Mike Nichols -
I was happy, I knew that. While experiencing happiness, we have difficulty in being conscious of it. Only when the happiness is past and we look back on it do we suddenly realize - sometimes with astonishment - how happy we had been.
-- Nikos Kazantzakis -
The knights of the theater represented to me not only the pinnacle of the profession but the esteem in which the profession was held. To find myself, to my astonishment, in that company is the grandest thing that has professionally happened to me.
-- Patrick Stewart -
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Egypt, the Egypt of antiquity, at a later time, exercised a mysterious fascination over me. I recognized a picture of it immediately, without hesitation and astonishment, in an illustrated magazine.
-- Pierre Loti -
I am interested only in the unknown and I work for my own astonishment.
-- Roberto Matta -
To mourn, perhaps, is simply to prolong a posture of astonishment ...
-- Sara SuleriSource : Sara Suleri (2018). “Meatless Days”, p.159, Penguin UK
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Much of our understanding of God's action in our lives in achieved in hindsight. When a particular crisis or event in our life has passed we cry out in astonishment like Jacob, 'The Lord is in this place and I never knew it.
-- Sheila Cassidy -
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Now and again I feel the astonishment of being alive like this, in this body.
-- Stephen DunnSource : Stephen Dunn (1995). “New and Selected Poems 1974-1994”, p.7, W. W. Norton & Company
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The Emrys! The Emrys is here!' Merlin shook his head in astonishment. 'Has it come to this?' he wondered. 'Even small children know me by sight.
-- Stephen R. Lawhead -
The worship of convention has never yet led to astonishment and a joyous leap in human potential.
-- Tama J. KievesSource : Tama J. Kieves (2004). “This Time I Dance!: Trusting the Journey of Creating the Work You Love”, Tarcher
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A socialist is just someone who is unable to get over his or her astonishment that most people who have lived and died have spent lives of wretched, fruitless, unremitting toil.
-- Terry EagletonSource : Terry Eagleton (1991). “Ideology: An Introduction”, p.82, Verso
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Live in a perpetual great astonishment.
-- Theodore RoethkeSource : Theodore Roethke (2006). “Straw for the Fire: From the Notebooks of Theodore Roethke, 1943-63”, p.175, Copper Canyon Press
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I find to my mixed astonishment that I do dream, but I didn't know it.
-- Theodore Sturgeon -
A writer lives, at best, in a state of astonishment.
-- William Sansom -
To my utter astonishment I saw an airship descending over my cow lot. It was occupied by six of the strangest beings I ever saw. They were jabbering together, but we could not understand a word they said.
-- Alexander Hamilton -
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That`s an astonishment that we`re waiting to find out what the [Donald Trump] policy is, that was the central plank, the central rationale for his candidacy.
-- Michelle GoldbergSource : Source: www.msnbc.com
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If there be a skeptical star I was born under it. Yet I have lived all my days in complete astonishment.
-- William Macneile DixonSource : William Macneile Dixon (1937). “The human situation”