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Exlpore more Wonder quotes
"I remember a cartoon depicting a chimney sweep falling from the roof of a tall building and noticing on the way that a signboard had one word spelled wrong, and wondering in his headlong flight why nobody had thought of correcting it. In a sense, we all are crashing to our death from the top story of our birth to the flat stones of the churchyard and wondering with an immortal Alice in Wonderland at the patterns of the passing wall. This capacity to wonder at trifles-no matter the imminent peril-these asides of the spirit, these footnotes in the volume of life are the highest forms of consciousness, and it is in this childishly speculative state of mind, so different from common sense and its logic, that we know the world to be good."
"When a beautiful reality looks unreal, you will realize that the beauty of reality is superior to any dream whatsoever!"
"What if stars were the glimmering tears of a giant, welling in his cheeks, waiting to fall at the first tender stroke of emotion? What if the moon were a wide-open eye gazing down on our tiny, little world and its tiny, little inhabitants as they rush to and fro in pursuit of tiny, little dreams? What if the sun were the glowing heart of a great beast, pumping hot blood to keep him alive while providing warmth for our pitiful world? Ahhh, imagination; it is a wondrous thing!"
"There is an anaesthetic of familiarity, a sedative of ordinariness which dulls the senses and hides the wonder of existence. For those of us not gifted in poetry, it is at least worth while from time to time making an effort to shake off the anaesthetic. What is the best way of countering the sluggish habitutation brought about by our gradual crawl from babyhood? We can't actually fly to another planet. But we can recapture that sense of having just tumbled out to life on a new world by looking at our own world in unfamiliar ways."
Explore more quotes by Walt Whitman
"Poets to ComePOETS to come! orators, singers, musicians to come!Not to-day is to justify me, and answer what I am for;But you, a new brood, native, athletic, continental, greater than before known,Arouse! Arousefor you must justify meyou must answer.I myself but write one or two indicative words for the future,I but advance a moment, only to wheel and hurry back in the darkness.I am a man who, sauntering along, without fully stopping, turns a casual look upon you, and then averts his face,Leaving it to you to prove and define it,Expecting the main things from you."
"I too am not a bit tamed, I too am untranslatable, I sound my barbaric yawp over the roofs of the world."
"I like the scientific spirit-the holding off, the being sure but not too sure, the willingness to surrender ideas when the evidence is against them: this is ultimately fine-it always keeps the way beyond open-always gives life, thought, affection, the whole man, a chance to try over again after a mistake-after a wrong guess."
"Why should I be afraid to trust myself to you? I am not afraid, I have been well brought forward by you..."
"The proof of a poet is that his country absorbs him as affectionately as he has absorbed it."
"Poor boy! I never knew you, Yet I think I could not refuse this moment to die for you, if that would save you."
"When the full-grown poet came,Out spake pleased Nature (the round impassive globe, with all its shows of day and night,) saying, He is mine;But out spake too the Soul of man, proud, jealous and unreconciled, Nay, he is mine alone;- Then the full-grown poet stood between the two, and took each by the hand;And to-day and ever so stands, as blender, uniter, tightly holding hands,Which he will never release until he reconciles the two,And wholly and joyously blends them."
"When I heard the learn'd astronomer; When the proofs, the figures, were ranged in columns before me; When I was shown the charts and the diagrams, to add, divide, and measure them; When I, sitting, heard the astronomer, where he lectured with much applause in the lecture-room, How soon, unaccountable, I became tired and sick;Till rising and gliding out, I wander'd off by myself, In the mystical moist night-air, and from time to time, Look'd up in perfect silence at the stars."
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