underscored

@underscored

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Tag:wonderClear

To extend it across the barrier of biology and sentience, to another creature endowed with a wholly other consciousness, partakes of the miraculous.

Maria Popova
2d ago

No man knows how much he is an optimist, even when he calls himself a pessimist, because he has not really measured the depths of his debt to whatever created him and enabled him to call himself anything. At the back of our brains… [there is] a forgotten blaze or burst of astonishment at our own existence. The object of the artistic and spiritual life [is] to dig for this submerged sunrise of wonder; so that a man sitting in a chair might suddenly understand that he [is] actually alive, and be happy.

1w ago

The moment one gives close attention to anything, even a blade of grass, it becomes a mysterious, awesome, indescribably magnificent world in itself.

1mo ago

We shall see but little way if we require to understand what we see. How few things can a man measure with the tape of his understanding! How many greater things might he be seeing in the meanwhile!

1mo ago

We arrive at truth, not by the reason alone, but by the whole man. Genius is the recovery of childhood at will—the power to live, think, and act in childhood again; so all great poets are necessarily children, in the sense that they retain the power of wonder and the capacity to see the world as if for the first time.

2mo ago

We do not need daylight and to that extent it is utilitarian, but moonlight we do not need. When it comes, it serves no necessity. It transforms.

2mo ago

We are made of star stuff. We are a way for the cosmos to know itself.

2mo ago

The lover of nature is he whose inward and outward senses are still truly adjusted to each other; who has retained the spirit of infancy even into the era of manhood.

2mo ago

We are made of starstuff. We are a way for the cosmos to know itself. We have come from the interstellar medium and into the form of conscious beings able to ask the supreme questions.

3mo ago

The atoms of our bodies are traceable to origins in the distant past; they are made of stardust literally.

4mo ago

The most incomprehensible thing about the world is that it is comprehensible.

4mo ago

The true function of philosophy is not to provide final answers, but to keep alive in us the sense of wonder at the world and our place in it.

4mo ago

The atoms of our bodies are traceable to origins in the distant past; we are made of stellar material, and the iron in our blood was forged in dying stars.

4mo ago

An irrational number — a number that cannot be expressed as a fraction, the ratio between two whole numbers — π unmoors our basic intuitions about reality with its disquieting whisper of an infinity beyond the grasp of reason.

4mo ago

The atoms of our bodies are traceable to origins in the distant past; they have formed the cores of stars—gone through many transformations of the universe and of all the transformations of matter in space and time we are their inheritors.

4mo ago

We are made of starstuff. We are a way for the cosmos to know itself.

5mo ago

those moments when our sudden stupefaction facing the world grows so profound that a pillow of air seems to lodge itself in our throats and we suddenly notice we haven't even taken a breath in tens of seconds.

5mo ago

Underscored — save the words that stop you in your tracks.

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