Awe-Inspiring Quotes

Wonder takes our breath away, and makes room for new breath. That’s why they call it breathtaking.

The truly beautiful, the great and sublime, when it overpowers us with astonishment and admiration, still does not surprise us as a thing foreign, never heard of, never seen; but, on the other hand, our own inmost nature in such moments becomes clear to us, our deepest remembrances are awakened, our dearest feelings made alive.

What can we say beyond Wow, in the presence of glorious art, in music so magnificent that it can't have originated solely on this side of things? Wonder takes our breath away, and makes room for new breath.

Wonder, or radical amazement, is a way of going beyond what is given in thing and thought, refusing to take anything for granted, to regard anything as final. It is our honest response to the grandeur and mystery of reality our confrontation with that which transcends the given.

For, indeed, everything about is marvelous, and wherever a man turns his gaze he sees the Godhead of the Word and is smitten with awe.

...how absurd human beings are and how magnificent.

It's all — let's use a very specific word here — miraculous. You, me, love, quarks, sex, chocolate, the speed of light — it's all miraculous, and it always has been.

Wonder or radical amazement is the chief characteristic of the religious man’s attitude toward history and nature. One attitude is alien to his spirit: taking things for granted, regarding events as a natural course of things.

The most beautiful thing we can experience is the mysterious. It is the source of all true art and science. He to whom the emotion is a stranger, who can no longer pause to wonder and stand wrapped in awe, is as good as dead — his eyes are closed. The insight into the mystery of life, coupled though it be with fear, has also given rise to religion. To know what is impenetrable to us really exists, manifesting itself as the highest wisdom and the most radiant beauty, which our dull faculties can comprehend only in their most primitive forms — this knowledge, this feeling is at the center of true religiousness.

One singular aspiration in all my work is to attain the state of awe. And what is awe? Awe is when you come across something that is infinitely complex and inexplicable by all your memory and thought systems — and yet comprehensible in a singular gasp of experience. It is an incredibly important emotion for me - the inexplicable is an invitation to engage with the cosmic void that humanity has been in a constant dialogue with for 250,000 years. And for the longest time, the void hasn’t answered back. In the last century, we have steadily found relevant answers, exponentially accumulating and organising into a more holistic meaning. A century ago the narrative was (and it still is, in many places) that if we probe too much into our universe and selves, we would lose out on our capacity of wonder, but exactly the reverse that has happened. When we’ve looked into the molecule we found the atom and when we looked into the atom we found the electron and when we’ve looked at the electron we have experienced sheer awe at its quantum probabilistic nature. So each time the scope of awe has expanded— expanding with it, our foresight, worldview and free will — for me, a film has to grasp that, and translate that experience.

Wonder or radical amazement is the chief characteristic of the religious man’s attitude toward history and nature.

You’re insane. Imagine my amazement.

The most beautiful thing we can experience is the mysterious. It is the source of all true art and all science. He to whom this emotion is a stranger, who can no longer pause to wonder and stand rapt in awe, is as good as dead: his eyes are closed.

Wonder or radical amazement is the chief characteristic of the religious man's attitude toward history and nature.

The most beautiful thing we can experience is the mysterious.