Wonder Quotes

500+ Sourced quotes

I sometimes wonder... if the land is not destroying the people who inhabit it as the people who inhabit it are destroying the land. A magic continent, a Peculiar Treasure, stuffed with riches, millions in it are starving in the midst of plenty.

Earth is so thick with divine possibility that it is a wonder we can walk anywhere without cracking our shins on altars.

Barbara Brown Taylor

My mother thought it would make us feel better to know animals had no souls and thus their deaths were not to be taken seriously. But it didn't help and when I think of some of the animals I have known, I wonder. The only really 'soulful' eyes in the world belong to the dog or cat who sits on your lap or at your feet commiserating when you cry.

Liz Smith (journalist)

To pray is to take notice of the wonder, to regain the sense of the mystery that animates all beings, the divine margin in all attainments. Prayer is our humble answer to the inconceivable surprise of living. It is all we can offer in return for the mystery by which we live. Who is worthy to be present at the constant unfolding of time?

Abraham Joshua Heschel

Yet what I sowed and what the orchard yields My brother's sons are gathering stalk and root, Small wonder then my children glean in fields They have not sown, and feed on bitter fruit.

The spark once transmitted may smoulder for generations under ashes, but the appointed time will come, and it will flare up to warm the world. God never allows waste. And we fools rub our eyes and wonder, when we see genius come out of the gutter. It didn't begin there. We tell ourselves that Shakespeare was the son of a woolpedlar, and Napoleon of a farmer, and Luther of a peasant, and we hold up our hands at the marvel. But who knows what kings and prophets they had in their ancestry!

When you expect nothing from the world - not the light of the sun, the wet of water, nor the air to breathe - everything is a wonder and every moment a gift.

Michael J. Sullivan (author)

I speak an open and disinterested language, dictated by no passion but that of humanity. To me, who have not only refused offers, because I thought them improper, but have declined rewards I might with reputation have accepted, it is no wonder that meanness and imposition appear disgustful. Independence is my happiness, and I view things as they are, without regard to place or person; my country is the world, and my religion is to do good.

I never met anyone who didn't have a very smart child. What happens to these children, you wonder, when they reach adulthood?

The wonder is not that so much cacophony appears in our actual individual lives, but that there is any appearance of harmony and progression.

We advance from law to the cause of law, and ask, What is that? Whence have come all these beautiful regulations? Here science leaves us, but only to conclude, from other grounds, that there is a First Cause to which all others are secondary and ministrative, a primitive almighty will, of which these laws are merely the mandates. That great Being, who shall say where is his dwelling-place or what his history! Man pauses breathless at the contemplation of a subject so much above his finite faculties, and only can wonder and adore!

Robert Chambers

I could not but wonder at the queen's unprecedented civility, until I realized with a flush of shame that it was my own improved behavior that motivated hers. So it is that we in life determine our own treatment.

Catherine Gilbert Murdock

I should not wonder if, considering all this, we were induced to think that nothing remained to be added; and yet we are still very ignorant in regard to the internal construction of the sun.... The spots have been supposed to be solid bodies, the smoke of volcanoes, the scum floating on an ocean of fluid matter, clouds, opaque masses, and to be many other things.... The sun itself has been called a globe of fire, though, perhaps, metaphorically.... It is time now to profit by the observations we are in possession of. I have availed myself of the labors of preceding astronomers, but have been induced thereto by my own actual observation of the solar phenomena.

William Herschel

All people interested in their work are liable to overrate their vocation. There may be makers of dolls' eyes who wonder how society would go on without them.

Harriet Martineau

All the girls walk by dressed up for each other And the boys do the boogie woogie On the corner of the street And the people passing by just stare in wild wonder And the inside jukebox roars just like thunder

When fathers are tongue tied religiously with their offspring, need they wonder if their children's hearts remain sin tied?

Charles Spurgeon

It just makes me wonder what subject you blame for talking to me every night.' I'm still settling on an answer for that one. Probably Chemistry. Jesus Christ. I can't believe I just wrote that.

Megan McCafferty

That is why we need to travel. If we don't offer ourself to the unknown, our senses dull. Our world becomes small and we lose our sense of wonder. Our eyes don't lift to the horizon; our ears don't hear the sounds around us. The edge is off our experience, and we pass our days in a routine that is both comfortable and limiting. We wake up one day and find that we have lost our dreams in order to protect our days.

As these images were going through my head, my breathing suddenly went still. I looked at Jamie, then up to the ceiling and around the room, doing my best to keep my composure, then back to Jamie again. She smiled at me and I smiled at her and all I could do was wonder how I'd ever fallen in love with a girl like Jamie Sullivan.

Nicholas Sparks

Just the other day, I was in my neighborhood Starbucks, waiting for the post office to open. I was enjoying a chocolatey cafe mocha when it occurred to me that to drink a mocha is to gulp down the entire history of the New World. From the Spanish exportation of Aztec cacao, and the Dutch invention of the chemical process for making cocoa, on down to the capitalist empire of Hershey, PA, and the lifestyle marketing of Seattle's Starbucks, the modern mocha is a bittersweet concoction of imperialism, genocide, invention, and consumerism served with whipped cream on top. No wonder it costs so much.

Two bulls in Mars's field your wonder claim,
Their hoofs of brass, their nostrils breathing flame.
These oft I seize, and to the yoke constrain
To plough four acres of the stubborn plain.
No seeds I sow, but scatter o'er the land
A dragon's teeth; when, lo! an armed band
Of chiefs spring up: but soon as they appear,
I slay th' embattled squadrons with my spear.
Each morn I yoke the bulls, at eve resign:
Perform this labour, and the fleece is thine.

Apollonius of Rhodes

And when I first saw you I first loved you
With a song that I sang to the fire in your eyes
But somebody told you that it wouldn't be easy
And you carried that lie for the devil to sing Some sail rivers deep and muddy some sail rivers clear and cold
But the river that I'm sailin' goes to sea
And sometimes I do grow weary sometimes I feel old
And sometimes I wonder if you think of me

I wash my hands, wonder how an awful day could turn even worse. It seems like at some point you'd just run out of awful.

Kathryn Stockett

You made this world to look so nice
I wonder what the next one's like?

Ploutos, no wonder mortals worship you:
You are so tolerant of their sins!

Theognis of Megara