existential awe Quotes

I find life so shocking in general. Everything about it surprises me.

Philosophy begins in wonder. And, at the end, when philosophic thought has done its best, the wonder remains.

Man seems merely dust postponed: the sublime as an encounter - pleasurable, intoxicating, even - with human weakness in the face of strength, age and size of the universe.

The thought of a limit to perceptual space and time staggers the mind.

St. Pope John XXIII called for the Second Vatican Council because he understood, as no Holy Father had in a long time, religion spoke to and found its language and symbols - its entire sense of the sacramental nature of existence - in the imagination that reveals not just the penalties of living, but the wonder and awe of our existence.

To reflect upon the event horizon is a great deal more awe-inspiring than a burning bush or a wooden statue that weeps or pees or bleeds.

I know that the molecules in my body are traceable to phenomena in the cosmos. That makes me want to grab people on the street and say: ‘Have you HEARD THIS?

I was not looking now at an unusual flower arrangement. I was seeing what Adam had seen on the morning of his creation - the miracle, moment by moment, of naked existence.

The universe seems to me infinitely strange and foreign. At such a moment I gaze upon it with a mixture of anguish and euphoria; separate from the universe, as though placed at a certain distance outside it; I look and I see pictures, creatures that move in a kind of timeless time and spaceless space, emitting sounds that are a kind of language I no longer understand or ever register.

I stood face to face with the moon and the ocean and the future that spread out with all its bewildering immensity before me.

Knee-deep in the cosmic overwhelm, I’m stricken by the ricochet wonder of it all: the plain everythingness of everything, in cahoots with the everythingness of everything else.

I do not wonder at a snowflake, a shell, a summer landscape, or the glory of the stars; but at the necessity of beauty under which the universe lies.

Life and the world, or whatever we call that which we are and feel, is an astonishing thing. The mist of familiarity obscures from us the wonder of our being. We are struck with admiration at some of its transient modifications, but it is itself the great miracle.

What I’m saying is I think life is staggering and we’re just used to it. We all are like spoiled children no longer impressed with the gifts we’re given—it’s just another sunset, just another rainstorm moving in over the mountain, just another child being born, just another funeral.

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.

Awareness of the divine begins with wonder.

Forget Jesus. The stars died so that you could be here today.

We're all talking about the same thing, whether it's religious people or New Age spiritual people or Buddhists or scientists. We're all talking about having a sense of awe and wonder at something grander than ourselves.

Our search for certainty rests in our attempts at understanding the history of all individual selves and all civilizations. Beyond that, there is only awe.

If God is vast and boundless as the ocean, how can a tiny drop like man imagine what He is?

I know, that Rilke quote - "Beauty is the beginning of terror" - I think about that a lot. It's that realization that we are so small, and yet we are so large in our capacity to relate to the beauty of things.

When we look upon lives so human and yet so small, we feel as if we ourselves were enlarged to an embarrassing bigness of stature. We feel the same kind of obligation to these creatures that a deity might feel if he had created something that he could not understand.

I think life is staggering and we're just too used to it.

What a dull universe it would be if everything in it conformed to our expectations, if it held nothing to surprise or baffle us or confound our common sense. A century ago no one foresaw the existence of black holes, an expanding universe, oceans on Jupiter's moons, or DNA. What could be more enriching than to know that we share a common origin with all living things, that we are kin to chimpanzees, redwoods and mollusks? And isn't it a source of wonder to realize that the iron in our blood and the calcium in our bones were created in the bellies of supernovas?

A curtain of stars, miles of them, are scattered, glowing, across the sky and their multitude humbles me, which I have a hard time tolerating. She shrugs and nods after I say something about forms of anxiety. It's as if her mind is having a hard time communicating with her mouth, as if she is searching for a rational analysis of who I am, which is, of course, an impossibility: there... is... no... key.