Astonishment Quotes

• 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

  Past, Looks, Sometimes

  Nikos Kazantzakis, Carl Wildman (1953). “Zorba the Greek”, p.65, Simon and Schuster

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• Every spring is the only spring, a perpetual astonishment.

  Ellis Peters

  Nature, Spring, Contentment

  Ellis Peters (2014). “The Summer Of The Danes”, p.115, Head of Zeus

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• We are survival machines – robot vehicles blindly programmed to preserve the selfish molecules known as genes. This is a truth which still fills me with astonishment.

  Richard Dawkins

  Selfish, Science, Survival

  1976 The Selfish Gene, ch.2.

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• Astonishment is the root of philosophy.

  Paul Tillich

  Philosophy, Roots, Tree

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• There’s nothing better than discovering, to your own astonishment, what you’re meant to do. It’s like falling in love.

  Mike Nichols

  Falling In Love, Fall, Discovering

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• Gratitude is the proper response for the absolute astonishment of getting to be alive, and aware, and an essential part of this crazy, sprawling story.

  John Green

  Gratitude, Crazy, Essentials

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• Live in a perpetual great astonishment.

  Theodore Roethke

  Perpetual

  Theodore Roethke (2006). “Straw for the Fire: From the Notebooks of Theodore Roethke, 1943-63”, p.175, Copper Canyon Press

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• We are at war with the most dangerous enemy that has ever faced mankind in his long climb from the swamp to the stars, and it has been said if we lose that war, and in so doing lose this way of freedom of ours, history will record with the greatest astonishment that those who had the most to lose did the least to prevent its happening.

  Ronald Reagan

  Stars, Military, War

  A Time for Choosing (aka "The Speech"), Air date 27 October 1964, Los Angeles, CA

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• The most exciting phrase to hear in science, the one that heralds new discoveries, is not 'Eureka!' but 'That's funny...'

  Isaac Asimov

  Inspirational, Funny, Motivational

  "Betting On a Bass That Belts Them Out; Singing Fish Becomes Season’s Unlikely Hit" by Darragh Johnson, The Washington Post, July 30, 2000.

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• I am all astonishment.

  Jane Austen

  Jane Austen (2005). “Pride and Prejudice”, p.33, Prestwick House Inc

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• I wanted to become the seeker, the aroused and passionate explorer, and it was better to go at it knowing nothing at all, always choosing the unmarked bottle, always choosing your own unproven method, armed with nothing but faith and a belief in astonishment.

  Pat Conroy

  Knowing Nothing, Bottles, Passionate

  Pat Conroy (2010). “The Lords of Discipline: A Novel”, p.171, Open Road Media

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• Retain, even in opposition, your capacity for astonishment.

  Thaddeus Stevens

  Capacity, Opposition

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• A man is whole only when he takes into account his shadow.

  Djuna Barnes

  Men, Shadow, Accounts

  Djuna Barnes (1995). “Nightwood: The Original Version and Related Drafts”

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• Vex not thy spirit at the course of things; they heed not thy vexation. How ludicrous and outlandish is astonishment at anything that may happen in life.

  Marcus Aurelius

  Life, Acceptance, Vex

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• The wayfarer, Perceiving the pathway to truth, Was struck with astonishment. It was thickly grown with weeds. "Ha," he said, "I see that none has passed here In a long time." Later he saw that each weed Was a singular knife. "Well," he mumbled at last, "Doubtless there are other roads.

  Stephen Crane

  Weed, Truth, Knives

  Stephen Crane (2016). “War Is Kind and Other Poems”, p.33, Courier Dover Publications

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• Realism falls short of reality. It shrinks it, attenuates it, falsifies it; it does not take into account our basic truths and our fundamental obsessions: love, death, astonishment. It presents man in a reduced and estranged perspective. Truth is in our dreams, in the imagination.

  Eugene Ionesco

  Love, Dream, Fall

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• The history of a man's soul, even the pettiest soul, is hardly less interesting and useful than the history of a whole people; especially when the former is the result of the observations of a mature mind upon itself, and has been written without any egotistical desire of arousing sympathy or astonishment. Rousseau's Confessions has precisely this defect – he read it to his friends.

  Mikhail Lermontov

  Men, People, Interesting

  "A Hero of Our Time". Book by Mikhail Lermontov, 1841.

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• For men, I think, love is a thing formed of equal parts lust and astonishment. The astonishment part women understand. The lust part they only think they understand.

  Stephen King

  Love Is, Men, Thinking

  Stephen King (1999). “Bag Of Bones: A Novel”, p.583, Simon and Schuster

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• I have not professionally dealt in truth. Many when they come to die have spent all the truth that was in them, and enter the next world as paupers. I have saved up enough to make an astonishment there.

  Mark Twain

  Funny, Truth, World

  Mark Twain (2010). “Mark Twain's Own Autobiography: The Chapters from the North American Review”, p.42, Univ of Wisconsin Press

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• Of all the marvelous works of God, perhaps the one angels view with the most supreme astonishment, is a proud man.

  Charles Caleb Colton

  God, Angel, Pride

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• To the philosophers of India, however, Relativity is no new discovery, just as the concept of light years is no matter for astonishment to people used to thinking of time in millions of kalpas, (A kalpa is about 4,320,000 years). The fact that the wise men of India have not been concerned with technological applications of this knowledge arises from the circumstance that technology is but one of innumerable ways of applying it.

  Alan Watts

  Wise, Technology, Men

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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 Eagleton

  People, Toil, Socialism

  Terry Eagleton (1991). “Ideology: An Introduction”, p.82, Verso

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• 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

  Knights, Theater, Pinnacle

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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

  Hope, Ideas, Fancy

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• We shall not attempt to give the reader an idea of that tetrahedron nose-that horse-shoe mouth-that small left eye over-shadowed by a red bushy brow, while the right eye disappeared entirely under an enormous wart-of those straggling teeth with breaches here and there like the battlements of a fortress-of that horny lip, over which one of those teeth projected like the tusk of an elephant-of that forked chin-and, above all, of the expression diffused over the whole-that mixture of malice, astonishment, and melancholy. Let the reader, if he can, figure to himself this combination.

  Victor Hugo

  Horse, Eye, Expression

  Victor Hugo (18??). “The Novels of Victor Hugo: Profusely Illustrated with Elegant Wood Engravings”

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