Wonder Quotes

500+ Sourced quotes

One may well wonder at the short-sightedness of those who ignore the characteristics which so clearly distinguish different things and declare that the laws of Solon and Lycurgus are all-sufficient to secure the greatest of republics, Athens and Sparta, because their sovereign authority is loyally accepted by those who enjoy that citizenship, yet deny that right reason, which is the fountain head of all other law, can impart freedom to the wise, who obey all that it prescribes or forbids.

It's really impossible for athletes to grow up. As long as you're playing, no one will let you. On the one hand, you're a child, still playing a game. And everybody around you acts like a kid, too. But on the other hand, you're a superhuman hero that everyone dreams of being. No wonder we have such a hard time understanding who we are.

Billie Jean King

I watched his interview with her, though. He asked her real difficult questions, like 'What would you say to Governor Bush?' 'What was her answer?' I wonder. 'Please,' Bush whimpers, his lips pursed in mock desperation, 'don't kill me.'

I wonder if what makes a family a family isn't doing everything right all the time but, instead, giving a second chance to the people you love who do things wrong.

I have neither curiosity, interest, pain nor pleasure, in anything, good or evil, they can say of me. I feel only a slight disgust, and a sort of wonder that they presume to write my name.

Percy Bysshe Shelley

I think you're a wonder. You're beautiful. You're mature. You are, I admit, vastly more experienced than I am. That's what threw me. I was thrown. Forgive me.

As the light begins to intensify, so does my misery, and I wonder how it is possible to hurt so much when nothing is wrong.

The vision disappeared as suddenly as it appeared. A weird silence fell on me. "What does it mean?" I asked in wonder.
"It is the image of the world," the voice said, "but it can be understood only after the Temple has been entered. This is a vision of the world in the circle of Time, amidst the four principles. But thou seest differently because thou seest the world outside thyself. Learn to see it in thyself and thou wilt understand the infinite essence, hidden in all illusory forms. Understand that the world which thou knowest is only one of the aspects of the infinite world, and things and phenomena are merely hierolgyphics of deeper ideas."

P. D. Ouspensky

Fifty million people die every year, six thousand die every hour, and over one hundred people die every minute. But when thousands of people die in the same place and at the same time, we are more likely to wonder why God would allow such a thing to happen.

I read in the proof-sheets of Hardy on Ramanujan: 'As someone said, each of the positive integers was one of his personal friends.' My reaction was, 'I wonder who said that; I wish I had.' In the next proof-sheets I read (what now stands): 'It was Littlewood who said...' (What had happened was that Hardy had received the remark in silence and with a poker face, and I wrote it off as a dud....)

John Edensor Littlewood

I am not surprised that men are not thankful to me; but I wonder that they are not grateful to God for the good which he has made me the instrument of conveying to my fellow-creatures.

I am a hunter of beauty and I move slow and I keep the eyes wide, every fiber of every muscle sensing all wonder and this is the thrill of the hunt and I could be an expert on the life full, the beauty meat that lurks in every moment. I hunger to taste life. God.

We'll all say that. We'll all go on and make the place safe. Roads, cities. New sky, new soil. Until it's all some kind of Siberia or Northwest Territories, and Mars will be gone and we'll be here, and we'll wonder why we feel so empty. Why when we look at the land we can never see anything but our own faces.

Perhaps I am too tame, too domestic a magician. But how does one work up a little madness? I meet with mad people every day in the street, but I never thought before to wonder how they got mad. Perhaps I should go wandering on lonely moors and barren shores. That is always a popular place for lunatics - in novels and plays at any rate. Perhaps wild England will make me mad.

To have lost is less disturbing than to wonder if we may possibly have won; and Eustacia could now, like other people at such a stage, take a standing-point outside herself, observe herself as a disinterested spectator, and think what a sport for Heaven this woman Eustacia was.

Oft did I wonder why the setting sun
Should look upon us with a blushing face:
Is't not for shame of what he hath seen done,
Whilst in our hemisphere he ran his race?

The wonder of the world is o'er:
The magic from the sea is gone:
There is no unimagined shore,
No islet yet to venture on.
The Sacred Hazels' blooms are shed,
The Nuts of Knowledge harvested.

George William Russell

It's a wonder to me, said Adams sourly, that you don't simply melt down in the white heat of your brilliance.

Clifford D. Simak

Every excellent company we studied is clear on what it stands for, and takes the process of value shaping seriously. In fact, we wonder whether it is possible to be an excellent company without clarity on values and without having the right sorts of values.

He was pretty. His eyes were kind and young. One had to wonder whether he was fourteen years old, or a thousand, being so smooth and untouched. A little boy peered out of the man's face. He was funny... I was bewildered... a man, responsible for the life and death of thousands, and yet there was no trace on him? One could be frightened of less, and yet so harmlessly innocent? Yes, innocent was the word... I knew I would remember this meeting the rest of my life, because I had never before met an emptyness like this.

Ingeborg Refling Hagen

Trump's message resonates deeply with those who feel they have been on the losing side of both the economic battle and the cultural battle of the last decades. You don't win anymore, he tells them. They feel deprived of their birthright, the American Dream. No wonder they are angry.

... And tell me what could be more humbling than to be lying in bed at two in the afternoon, without a shower in twelve days; to look across the room you live in and see in the corner a pile of pizza boxes; to be afraid of undrawing the curtains and opening the window, so removed from people so as not to even wonder who would care if you did or if you didn't do this or that; and to find that the day's only scintilla of hope flickers in the moment you reach for the television remote control.

Zia Haider Rahman

There is wonder and a certain wicked pleasure in these giddy ascents and terrible falls, especially as they happen to other people.

John Kenneth Galbraith

A strange thing happens when you interview a robot. You feel an urge to be profound: to ask profound questions. I suppose it's an inter-species thing. Although if it is I wonder why I never try and be profound around my dog.
'What does electricity taste like?' I ask.
'Like a planet around a star,' Bina48 replies.
Which is either extraordinary or meaningless - I'm not sure which

I wonder if other mothers feel a tug at their insides, watching their children grow up into the people they themselves wanted so badly to be.