For a transitory enchanted moment, man must have held his breath in the presence of this continent, compelled into an aesthetic contemplation he neither understood nor desired, face to face for the last time in history with something commensurate to his capacity for wonder.
—F. Scott Fitzgerald
The revolt of the poet is invariably conservative at its roots.… Not politically conservative, but imaginatively conservative, with a profound regard for what is given, as earth or air, sun or moon or stars, or the dreams of man.
—Cid Corman
The actual tragedies of life bear no relation to one's preconceived ideas. In the event, one is always bewildered by their simplicity, their grandeur of design, and by that element of the bizzare which seems inherent in them.
—Jean Cocteau
I see nothing in space as promising as the view from a Ferris wheel.
—E. B. White
A man who possesses a veneration of life will not simply say his prayers. He will throw himself into the battle to preserve life, if for no other reason than that he himself is an extension of life around him.
—Albert Schweitzer
We take a handful of sand from the endless landscape of awareness around us, and call that handful of sand the world.
—Robert Pirsig
Sometimes I remind myself that I almost skipped the party, that I almost went to a different college, that the whim of a minute could have changed everything and everyone. Our lives, so settled, so specific, are built on happenstance.
—Anna Quindlen in Every Last One
If anything is sacred, the human body is sacred.
—Walt Whitman
There is so much beauty in just existing. In being alive.
—Hannah Harrington in Saving June
Why is this thus? What is the reason for this thusness?
—Artemus Ward
A sense of reverence is necessary for psychological health. If a person has no sense of reverence, no feeling that there is anyone or anything that inspires awe, it cuts the personality off completely from the nourishing springs of the unconscious.
—Robert Johnson
In answer to the question of why it happened, I offer the modest proposal that our Universe is simply one of those things which happen from time to time.
—Edward P. Tryon
The first mystery is simply that there is a mystery, a mystery that can never be explained or understood, only encountered from time to time. Nothing is obvious. Everything conceals something else.
—Lawrence Kushner
I'm astounded by people who want to "know" the universe when it's hard enough to find your way around Chinatown.
—Woody Allen
It gives one a feeling of confidence to see nature still busy with experiments, still dynamic, and not through nor satisfied because a Devonian fish managed to end as a two-legged character with a straw hat. There are other things brewing and growing in the oceanic vat. It pays to know this. It pays to know that there is just as much future as there is past. The only thing that doesn't pay is to be sure of man's own part in it. There are things down there still coming ashore.
—Loren Eiseley