I want to invent a What does it do? machine. “What does it do?” you’re probably wondering. Well, I’ll tell you. What it does is makes you wonder: What does it do?

The ‘deep pause’ needed to cultivate wonder is far too often back-filled with an incessant busyness, as busyness errantly presumes a ‘deep pause’ to be deeply wasteful.

When someone is talking about their job, and they turn to me and ask me what I do, I stare off into space, let my eyes glaze over, and wistfully say, “I often wonder what I’m doing.

God is a strange and mysterious master, and I no doubt am a strange and mysterious servant, but from this day forward I am His. I am forever changed, by my own choice, and I wonder if He is too.

God calls big trees out of small seeds, so He prepares great monuments out of small minds. He will definitely call those wonderful things he put in you out of you. When He begins, do not resist!

The surest way to suppress our ability to understand the meaning of God and the importance of worship is to take things for granted...Indifference to the sublime wonder of living is the root of sin.

[I]sn't it sad to go to your grave without ever wondering why you were born? Who, with such a thought, would not spring from bed, eager to resume discovering the world and rejoicing to be part of it?

To cease to wonder is to fall plumb-down from the childlike to the commonplace—the most undivine of all moods intellectual. Our nature can never be at home among things that are not wonderful to us.

When you don't cover up the world with words and labels, a sense of the miraculous returns to your life that was lost a long time ago when humanity, instead of using thought, became possessed by thought.

At the back of our brains, so to speak, there was a forgotten blaze or burst of astonishment at our own existence. The object of the artistic and spiritual life was to dig for this submerged sunrise of wonder.

Now I sense the perfume of flowers like seeing a new thing.I know they smell just as well as I know I existed.They’re things known from the outside.But now I know with my breathing from the back of my head.

Knee-deep in the cosmic overwhelm, I’m strickenby the ricochet wonder of it all: the plaineverythingness of everything, in cahootswith the everythingness of everything else.- From Diffraction (for Carl Sagan)

Earthly nature may be parsimonious, but the human mind is prodigal, itself an anomaly that in its wealth of error as well as of insight is exceptional, utterly unique as far as we know, properly an object of wonder.

I mulled over the implications and decided not to waste my time worrying about what everyone else thought, or to bother attempting to change their perceptions. My time at the Keep was just a stopover. Let them wonder.

A man should hear a little music, read a little poetry, and see a fine picture every day of his life, in order that worldly cares may not obliterate the sense of the beautiful which God has implanted in the human soul.