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Astonishment is the root of philosophy. -- Paul Tillich
The politics of surprise leads through the Gates of Astonishment into the Kingdom of Hope. -- Max Lerner
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
Every spring is the only spring, a perpetual astonishment. -- Ellis Peters
Explanation separates us from astonishment, which is the only gateway to the incomprehensible. -- Eugene Ionesco
I find to my mixed astonishment that I do dream, but I didn't know it. -- Theodore Sturgeon
The way to do research is to attack the facts at the point of greatest astonishment. -- Celia Green
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 Helmholtz
Anthropology demands the open-mindedness with which one must look and listen, record in astonishment and wonder that which one would not have been able to guess. -- Margaret Mead
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've been a woman for a little over 50 years and have gotten over my initial astonishment. As for conducting an orchestra, that's a job where I don't think sex plays much part. -- Nadia Boulanger
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 Monk
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
I requested the gentlemen to put on their hats, and the ladies their shawls, to avoid catching cold, and then had the windows widely opened. This proceeding caused some astonishment and alarm at first; for the Americans generally have a dread of cold air. -- George Combe
I am all astonishment. -- Jane Austen
Astonishment is the proper response to reality. -- Terence McKenna
Magic is not about having a puzzle to solve. It's about creating a moment of awe and astonishment. And that can be a beautiful thing -- David Blaine
A man is whole only when he takes into account his shadow as well as himself - and what is a man's shadow but his upright astonishment? -- Djuna Barnes
The Astonishment Tapes will now take its place within the growing field of international research about postwar American poetry's important contribution to world literature. Miriam Nichols has once again done exceptional scholarship. -- Peter Gizzi
I doubt that the phenomenon was any terrestrial reflection, because... nothing of the kind has ever appeared before or since... I was so unprepared for such a strange sight that I was really petrified with astonishment. -- Clyde Tombaugh
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 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
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
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
My sculptures cause an uproar, astonishment, and put a smile on your face. -- Florentijn Hofman
There's nothing better than discovering, to your own astonishment, what you're meant to do. It's like falling in love. -- Mike Nichols
When you're writing, you're in a totally different zone... I can start a difficult poem and look up at the clock and see to my astonishment that three hours have passed. -- Felix Dennis
The first time I set out to find George F. Kennan, in 1982, I had just turned 21, begun my final semester at Princeton University and noticed with astonishment that the senior thesis deadline had crept to within four months. -- Barton Gellman
I realised a little bit to my astonishment that I can give a lecture for a thousand people, and there will be this tumultuous applause, so, you know, I have the feeling well, it can't be all that bad. -- Edmund Hillary
It is a standing source of astonishment and amusement to visitors that the British Museum has so few British things in it: that it is a museum about the world as seen from Britain rather than a history focused on these islands. -- Neil MacGregor
When I met Miller, for me it wasn't a question of wanting to meet him because it was Arthur Miller; it was a kind of astonishment that I could meet someone who was so deeply embedded in the psyche of my artistic development. -- Simon McBurney
Central to everything I am and believe and have written is my astonishment, naive as it seems to people, that you can use human speech both to bless, to love, to build, to forgive and also to torture, to hate, to destroy and to annihilate. -- George Steiner
I don't care that much about rote memorization. An old boyfriend of mine used to get into lacerating arguments with his parents over facts, and I used to watch on in mute astonishment. How could anyone actually argue about something that could be looked up? -- Susan Orlean
Every time an article is written about me or any of my contemporaries who's had the fortune and discipline to look good at a certain age, I am struck by the tone of astonishment, and the certainty that something is being done secretively to beat the devil. -- Joan Collins
Little by little, not without astonishment, I rediscovered the great names of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, who had been the master thinkers of my grandfather and other Mexican liberals. They did no offer me a doctrine or a catechism: they were and they are a source, an inspiration. -- Octavio Paz
I honestly felt no envy or resentment, only astonishment at how much of a world there was out there and how much of it others already knew. The agenda for self-cultivation that had been set for my classmates by their teachers and parents was something I'd have to develop for myself. -- Sonia Sotomayor
Rome is an astonishment! -- Harriet Beecher Stowe
Live in a perpetual great astonishment. -- Theodore Roethke
Retain, even in opposition, your capacity for astonishment. -- Thaddeus Stevens
I shall continue to explore-the astonishment of living. -- Enid Bagnold
Every spring is the only spring, a perpetual astonishment! -- Ellis Peters
In extraordinary events ignorance of their causes produces astonishment. -- Marcus Tullius Cicero
A writer lives, at best, in a state of astonishment. -- William Sansom
To mourn, perhaps, is simply to prolong a posture of astonishment ... -- Sara Suleri
There is that unique moment when one confronts something new and astonishment begins. -- Diane Ackerman
I am interested only in the unknown and I work for my own astonishment. -- Roberto Matta
Now and again I feel the astonishment of being alive like this, in this body. -- Stephen Dunn
When I wake up, I wake to something worse. It's the astonishment of being myself -- Jorge Luis Borges
A quite specific astonishment stands at the beginning of every theological perception, inquiry, and thought. -- Karl Barth
I sometimes think that the universe is a machine designed for the perpetual astonishment of astronomers. -- Arthur C. Clarke
...there is a fine line between wishing to produce child-like astonishment and treating people like infants. -- Derren Brown
Attention, if sudden and close, graduates into surprise; and this into astonishment; and this into stupefied amazement. -- Charles Darwin
Sometimes, people trying to commit suicide manage it in a manner that leaves them breathless with astonishment. -- Salman Rushdie
The ideas are secondary to the primary premise of people's potential. I'm always in wonder and astonishment. -- Jean Houston
One day, to everyone's astonishment, someone drops a match in the powder keg and everything blows up. -- James A. Baldwin
I find to my astonishment that an unhappy marriage goes on being unhappy when it is over. -- Rebecca West
The worship of convention has never yet led to astonishment and a joyous leap in human potential. -- Tama J. Kieves
A fool who has a flash of wit creates astonishment and scandal, like hack-horses setting out to gallop. -- Nicolas Chamfort
Gordon Way's astonishment at being suddenly shot dead was nothing compared to his astonishment at what happened next. -- Douglas Adams
Yeah, well, food's one of the five exceptions to Gamp's Law of Elemental Transfigurations," said Ron, to general astonishment. -- J. K. Rowling
People travel to marvel at the mountains, seas, rivers and stars and they pass right by themselves without astonishment. -- Saint Augustine
They seek neither truth nor likelihood; they seek astonishment. They think metaphysics is a branch of the literature of fantasy -- Jorge Luis Borges
The astonishment of life is the absence of any appearances of reconciliation between the theory and the practice of life. -- Ralph Waldo Emerson
If there be a skeptical star I was born under it. Yet I have lived all my days in complete astonishment. -- William Macneile Dixon
Of all the marvelous works of God, perhaps the one angels view with the most supreme astonishment, is a proud man. -- Charles Caleb Colton
HELPED are those who are shown the existence of the Creator's magic in the Universe; they shall experience delight and astonishment without ceasing. -- Alice Walker
The greatest astonishment of my life was the discovery that the man who does the work is not the man who gets rich -- Andrew Carnegie
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
People who relate what they believe to be new and startling information like to have such information received with exclamations of astonishment and admiration. -- Barbara Mertz
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
Anthropology demands the open-mindedness with which one must look and listen, record in astonishment and wonder that which one would not have been able to guess -- Margaret Mead
He produced a handkerchiefâ??crisply foldedâ??and handed it to her. She took it with silent astonishment. Sheâ??d never before known anyone who carried a handkerchief. -- Cassandra Clare
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
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
Never in my life had I felt so tangibly and with such astonishment that hate, by passing successively through comprehension, mercy, and sympathy, can be transformed into love. -- Nikos Kazantzakis
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
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 Meyerowitz
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 Goldberg
the story of my marriage, which is the great joy and astonishment of my life, is too much like a fairy tale, the German kind, unsweetened by Disney. -- Ann Patchett
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
Although the constant shadow of certain death looms over everyday, the pleasures and joys of life can be so fine and affecting that the heart is nearly stilled in astonishment. -- Dean Koontz
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
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
It certainly strikes the beholder with astonishment, to perceive what vast difficulties can be overcome by the pigmy arms of little mortal man, aided by science and directed by superior skill. -- Henry VIII of England
At the back of our brains is a blaze of astonishment at our own existence. The object of the artistic and spiritual life is to dig for this sunrise of wonder. -- Gilbert K. Chesterton
... I watched in astonishment, Jess reached up and cupped Miss Georgia's breasts in her hands, giving them an appraising squeeze and admiring nod. A moment later, Miss Georgia returned the gesture... -- Jefferson Bass
On the top of Cadair Idris,I felt how happy a man might bewith a little money and a sane intellect,and reflected with astonishment and pityon the madness of the multitude. -- Thomas Love Peacock
The overwhelming astonishment, the queerest structure we know about so far in the whole universe, the greatest of all cosmological scientific puzzles, confounding all our efforts to comprehend it, is the earth. -- Lewis Thomas
A writer lives, at best, in a state of astonishment. Beneath any feeling he has of the good or evil of the world lies a deeper one of wonder at it all. -- William Sansom
Woman is shut up in a kitchen or in a boudoir, and astonishment is expressed that her horizon is limited. Her wings are clipped, and it is found deplorable that she cannot fly. -- Simone de Beauvoir
Almost one half of our time is spent in telling and hearing evil of one another ... and every hour brings forth something strange and terrible to fill up our discourse and our astonishment. -- Laurence Sterne
This is what holidays, travels, vacations are about. It is not really rest or even leisure we chase. We strain to renew our capacity for wonder to shock ourselves into astonishment once again. -- Shana Alexander
The habits of craft, developed day in and day out over a working lifetime, create moments of astonishment, sublime and magical effects, precisely because the writer is not thinking overtly about making art. -- Philip Gerard
That which is not slightly distorted lacks sensible appeal; from which it follows that irregularity â?? that is to say, the unexpected, surprise and astonishment, are a essential part and characteristic of beauty. -- Charles Baudelaire
In alarming proportions the following words have disappeared from architectural publications: beauty, inspiration, magic, sorcery, enchantment, and also serenity, mystery, silence, privacy, astonishment. All of these have found a loving home in my soul. -- Luis Barragan
I was a young man with uninformed ideas. I threw out queries, suggestions, wondering all the time over everything; and to my astonishment the ideas took like wildfire. People made a religion of them. -- Charles Darwin
My reaction to your news is delighted astonishment that Lanark has been judged more popular than a book by Ian Rankin, and only regret that this wonderful honour had no money attached to it! -- Christopher Brookmyre
[On being asked how it felt to be the first female conductor of the Boston Symphony:] I've been a woman for a little more than fifty years, and I've gotten over my original astonishment. -- Nadia Boulanger
There are some women who seem to be born without fear, just as there are people who are born without the ability to feel pain ... Providence appears to protect such women, maybe out of astonishment. -- Margaret Atwood
The worthless and offensive members of society, whose existence is a social pest, invariably think themselves the most ill-used people alive, and never get over their astonishment at the ingratitude and selfishness of their contemporaries. -- Ralph Waldo Emerson
Max lifted his head, with great sorrow and great astonishment. 'There were stars,' He said. 'They burned my eyes.' ...from a Himmel street window, he wrote, the stars set fire to my eyes. -- Markus Zusak

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