W. N. P. Barbellion Quotes

Suddenly I awake to a stark amazement at everything... To be alive is so incredible that all I can do is to lie still and merely breathe.

The reason I can give wonder is that I feel wonder about the world: the stars, a tree, my body - everything.

All we behold is miracle.

If we have never been amazed by the very fact that we exist, we are squandering the greatest fact of all.

Philosophy, if it cannot answer so many questions as we could wish, has at least the power of asking questions which increase the interest of the world, and show the strangeness and wonder lying just below the surface even in the commonest things of daily life.

I must be mad, or very tired, When the curve of a blue bay beyond a railroad track Is shrill and sweet to me like the sudden springing of a tune, And the sight of a white church above thin trees in a city square Amazes my eyes as though it were the Parthenon.

I know that to personalize the Earth System as Gaia, as I have often done and continue to do in this book, irritates the scientifically correct, but I am unrepentant because metaphors are more than ever needed for a widespread comprehension of the true nature of the Earth and an understanding of the lethal dangers that lie ahead.

I remember staring at my son endlessly when he was an infant, stunned by his very existence, wondering where on earth he had come from.

Nothing is orderly till man takes hold of it. Everything in creation lies around loose.

I suppose the pleasure of country life lies really in the eternally renewed evidences of the determination to live.

Our nature lies in movement; complete calm is death.

The beauty of the natural world lies in the details.

What wonders lie in every mountain day!

Life is the most spectacular show on earth.

Life is a beautiful, magnificent thing, even to a jellyfish.

I wonder at the weight of a Sparrow.

Our natures lie in motion, without which we die.

If we were never depressed we should not be alive; it is the nature of a crystal never to be depressed.

When I see nature, when I look into the sky, the dawn, the sun, the colors of insects, snow crystals, the night stars, I don't feel a need for God. Perhaps when I can no longer look and wonder, when I believe in nothing - then, perhaps, I might need something else. But I don't know what.

The bottom of being is left logically opaque to us, a datum in the strict sense of the word, something we simply come upon and find, and about which (if we wish to act) we should pause and wonder as little as possible. In this confession lies the lasting truth of empiricism.

It's wonderful to be alive and to walk on earth.

Wonder is the beginning of wisdom in learning from books as well as from nature.