Henry Beston Quotes

From a good book, I want to be taken to the very edge. I want a glimpse into that outer darkness.

Savor the mystery, Stephen, we don't get enough of them.

The most beautiful thing we can experience is the mysterious. It is the source of all true art and science.

With BSG, sci-fi is the human experience taken beyond the envelope. When I first became involved with the project, I knew that I would be able to play a human being for many years, exploring and reflecting on issues that would impact people's lives.

I first became aware of the delights of the natural world when my father, an entomologist, presented me with what looked like a twig. When it got up and walked, my delight was such that I wrote a poem, 'To a Walking Stick.'

It was the experience of mystery - even if mixed with fear - that engendered religion.

Divinity is an emotion of being lifted out of yourself and being part of something much bigger than yourself that makes you go, 'Oh my God.' And that sense of awe? It's the second rule of science.

Mystery creates wonder and wonder is the basis of man's desire to understand.

Mystery is at the heart of creativity. That, and surprise.

My job as a human being as well as a writer is to feel as thoroughly as possible the experience that I am part of, and then press it a little further.

For my part I know nothing with any certainty, but the sight of the stars makes me dream.

I'm always astonished by a forest. It makes me realise that the fantasy of nature is much larger than my own fantasy. I still have things to learn.

Science is not about control. It is about cultivating a perpetual condition of wonder in the face of something that forever grows one step richer and subtler than our latest theory about it. It is about reverence, not mastery.

If our hearts are ready for anything, we are touched by the beauty and poetry and mystery that fill our world.

One travels so as to learn once more how to marvel at life in the way a child does. And blessed be the poet, the artist who knows how to keep alive his sense of wonder.

Fiction seeks to represent human experience as it is lived and as it reverberates in our hopes, fears, dreams, and memories. So much of our lives are internal. The art of fiction has claimed - more than anything else - this internal ground as its own.

To me, science fiction is about the sense of mystery, the sense of awe. Not 'shock and awe', just 'awe.'

I remember when I was a child... walking into the woods by myself and feeling the solitude around me build like electricity and pass through my body with a jolt that made my hair prickle.

Joy in the universe, and keen curiosity about it all - that has been my religion.

The world is a strange and wonderful place.

Deep into that darkness peering, long I stood there, wondering, fearing, doubting, dreaming dreams no mortal ever dared to dream before.

Writing fiction has developed in me an abiding respect for the unknown in a human lifetime and a sense of where to look for the threads, how to follow, how to connect, find in the thick of the tangle what clear line persists.

Poetry is that sentiment of the soul, or faculty of the mind, which enables its possessor to appreciate and realize the heights and depths of human experience. It is the power to feel pleasure or suffer pain in all its exquisiteness and intensity.

We all need poetry. The moments in our lives that are characterized by language that has to do with necessity or the market, or just, you know, things that take us away from the big questions that we have, those are the things that I think urge us to think about what a poem can offer.

We have people we admire, like Einstein, saying mystery is the most beautiful thing a human being can experience. Yet, everywhere in our culture, everything that is truly mysterious is immediately dismissed.