Wordgrove Post & Review

Quoted In The Grove:   awe

We stand in awe before that which cannot be seen. We respect with every fiber of our being that which cannot be explained.
~Tite Kubo

People’s lives, in Jubilee as elsewhere, were dull, simple, amazing, and unfathomable – deep caves paved with kitchen linoleum.
~Alice Munro

If the world could remain within a frame like a painting on the wall, I think we’d see the beauty then and stand staring in awe.
~Conor Oberst

EndQuote:
Because when beauty awes you, you must halt and try to catch your breath and your staggered heart.
~Kate Elliott

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Prewritten Prompt  circa 08/07:   shadow

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I begin to see an object when I cease to understand it.
~Henry David Thoreau

At the moment you are most in awe of all there is about life that you don’t understand, you are closer to understanding it all than at any other time.
~Jane Wagner

~

There are two ways to live: you can live as if nothing is a miracle; you can live as if everything is a miracle. 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.
~Albert Einstein

We are all born as animals and live the life that animals live: we sleep, eat, reproduce, and fight. There is, however, another order of living, which the animals do not know, that of awe before the mystery of being
~Joseph Campbell

(Some people) have a wonderful capacity to appreciate again and again, freshly and naively, the basic goods of life, with awe, pleasure, wonder, and even ecstasy.
~Abraham Maslow

I am curious about many things, and find the world around me, and the people and objects and things in it, equally fascinating. There is a great deal of that awe and wonder in me.
~William Shatner

To know what is impenetrable to us really exists, manifesting itself as the highest wisdom and the most radiant beauty… this knowledge, this feeling is at the center of true religiousness.
~Albert Einstein

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When you look at yourself and feel dissatisfaction about any part of you, you will continue to attract feelings of dissatisfaction, because the law mirrors back to you exactly what you are holding inside. Be in awe and wonder at the magnificence of you!
~Rhonda Byrne

Most people are not in the world of awe and wonder. They’re in the world of deadness. Their perceptual fields and bodies are completely self-reflective, and all they see is themselves wherever they go.
~Frederick Lenz

Nature in her unfathomable designs had mixed us of clay and flame, of brain and mind, that the two things hang indubitably together and determine each other’s being, but how or why, no mortal may ever know.
~William James

When I look at the human brain I’m still in awe of it.
~Benjamin Carson

Self-esteem is the result of recognizing our personal power; awe and wonder come from recognizing our lack of it. Both are true, and in an exceptional life there is no conflict between them.
~Victoria Moran

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Yes, Mother. I can see you are flawed. You have not hidden it. That is your greatest gift to me.
~Alice Walker

The low points I had all helped make up my character, so I probably wouldn’t want to do away with them because I like being flawed and I like having them help me grow and change and become better and stronger.
~Drew Barrymore

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Every human life involves an unfathomable mystery, for man is the riddle of the universe, and the riddle of man in his endowment with personal capacities.
~Harry Emerson Fosdick

Life is filled with potential that is truly unfathomable. At last we are coming to see the enormous power it possesses. That is why we must never write anyone off. In particular, we mustn’t put boundaries on our own potential. In most cases, our so-called limitations are nothing more than our own decision to limit ourselves.
~Daisaku Ikeda

Every human has an unfathomable gift that only meeting life head on will reveal.
~Mark Nepo

Do not be awe struck by other people and try to copy them. Nobody can be you as efficiently as you can.
~Norman Vincent Peale

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Posted From The Grove

Be a terror to the butchers, that they may be fair in their weight; and keep hucksters and fraudulent dealers in awe, for the same reason.
~Miguel de Cervantes

Arms, like laws, discourage and keep the invader and plunderer in awe and preserve order.
~Thomas Paine

I think Stalin was afraid of Roosevelt. Whenever Roosevelt spoke, he sort of watched him with a certain awe. He was afraid of Roosevelt’s influence in the world.
~W Averell Harriman

During the time men live without a common power to keep them all in awe, they are in that conditions called war; and such a war, as if of every man, against every man.
~Thomas Hobbes

An America that inspires hope in its ideals must complement an America that inspires awe in its strength.
~Adam Schiff

~

One to destroy, is murder by the law;
and gibbets keep the lifted hand in awe;
to murder thousands, takes a specious name,
‘War’s glorious art’, and gives immortal fame.
~Edward Young

It is my conviction that killing under the cloak of war is nothing but an act of murder.
~Albert Einstein

There will be no lasting peace either in the heart of individuals or in social customs until death is outlawed.
~Albert Camus

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The more clearly we can focus our attention on the wonders and realities of the universe about us, the less taste we shall have for destruction.
~Rachel Carson

The conqueror is regarded with awe; the wise man commands our respect; but it is only the benevolent man that wins our affection.
~William Dean Howells

Since when have we Americans been expected to bow submissively to authority and speak with awe and reverence to those who represent us?
~William O Douglas

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~awe:  Stellar Nursery — visual meditation to music   (10:42)   Hubble, with stars like dust motes
https://vimeo.com/369927882

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~Ai Creative Studio:  Majlis Persandingan Awe & Amylia   (5:10)   South Asian wedding, culture made beautiful
https://vimeo.com/143483165

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~Jason Silva:  Shots of Awe – Awe   (2:48)   inspirational
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8QyVZrV3d3o

-and-

~Jason Silva:  Shots of Awe – Existential Bummer   (2:53)   also inspirational
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Yb-OYmHVchQ

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~WSF:  What is String Theory   (2:34)   lucid explanation, from:  CNN’s 5 Things
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TI6sY0kCPpk

~~

If there were no eternal consciousness in a man, if at the bottom of everything there were only a wild ferment, a power that twisting in dark passions produced everything great or inconsequential; if an unfathomable, insatiable emptiness lay hid beneath everything, what would life be but despair?
~Soren Kierkegaard

Everything ends, and Everything matters. Everything matters not in spite of the end of you and all that you love, but because of it. Everything is all you’ve got…and after Everything is nothing. So you were wise to welcome Everything, the good and the bad alike, and cling to it all. Gather it in. Seek the meaning in sorrow and don’t ever turn away, not once, from here until the end. Because it is all the same, it is all unfathomable, and it is all infinitely preferable to the one dreadful alternative.
~Ron Currie, Jr

O your life, your lonely life
What have you ever done with it,
And done with the great gift of consciousness?
What will you ever do before Death’s knife
Provides the answer ultimate and appropriate?
As I for my part felt in my heart as one who falls,
Falls in a parachute, falls endlessly, and feels the vast
Draft of the abyss sucking him down and down,
An endlessly helplessly falling and appalled clown:
This is the way the night passes by, this
Is the overnight endless trip to the famous unfathomable abyss.
~Delmore Schwartz

Suicide is a particularly awful way to die: the mental suffering leading up to it is usually prolonged, intense and unpalliated. There is no morphine equivalent to ease the acute pain, and death, not uncommonly, is violent and grisly. The suffering of a suicidal is private and inexpressible, leaving family members, friends and colleagues to deal with an almost unfathomable kind of loss, as well as guilt. Suicide carries in its aftermath a level of confusion and devastation that is, for the most part, beyond description.
~Kay Redfield Jamison

It is not just nature that defies us. Human life is as overwhelming… If we spend time in it [the vast spaces of nature], they may help us to accept more graciously the great, unfathomable events that molest our lives and will inevitably return us to dust.
~Alain de Botton

When we find our core certainty within, then we no longer look for certainty outside. The unfathomable nature of the ever-changing world ceases to be a source of anxiety and instead is a source of joy and adventure.
~Deepak Chopra

Rather than admire the mediocre great men over whom passersby nudge each other in awe, I venerate the young, unknown geniuses who die in their teens, their souls shattered — delicate, phosphorescent glowworms that one must see to know they really did exist.
~Knut Hamsun

We cannot banish dangers, but we can banish fears. We must not demean life by standing in awe of death.
~David Sarnoff

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Two things fill the mind with ever-increasing wonder and awe: the starry heavens above me and the moral law within me… Morality is not properly the doctrine of how we may make ourselves happy, but how we may make ourselves worthy of happiness.
~Immanuel Kant

It is only on the condition of humility and reverence before the world that our species will be able to remain in it.
~Wendell Berry

When men lack a sense of awe, there will be disaster.
~Lao Tse

The important thing is not to stop questioning. Curiosity has its own reason for existing. One cannot help but be in awe when he contemplates the mysteries of eternity, of life, of the marvelous structure of reality… Never lose a holy curiosity.
~Albert Einstein

For years I have watched people in their confrontation with the unknown recover awe, wonder, joy, and aliveness. They have remembered that life is holy, and they have reminded me as well. In losing our sense of Mystery, we have become a nation of burned-out people. People who wonder do not burn out.
~Rachel Naomi Remen

Nothing is more contagious than genuine love and genuine care. Nothing is more exhilarating than authentic awe and wonder. Nothing is more exciting than to witness people having the courage to fight for their highest vision.
~Michael Lerner

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VIDEO:

I am filled with awe that filmmakers have the capacity to stir us and give us back a sense of wonder.
~Theodore Bikel

And I love Mel Brooks. My Dad loved his movies, too, they’re awesome, the kind of thing that if you’re in for ten minutes, you’re in for two hours.
~Mike Myers

I always thought that the spine of a character was awe and wonder.
~William Shatner

I love being around great actors and film-makers, and I try to hide the fact that I’m in awe of them.
~Jessica Chastain

Creative people are very insecure people because they don’t know whether people like them or are in awe of them. That insecurity always comes out. It makes them a better actor, I feel.
~Persis Khambatta

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A friend who is far away is sometimes much nearer than one who is at hand. Is not the mountain far more awe-inspiring and more clearly visible to one passing through the valley than to those who inhabit the mountain?
~Khalil Gibran

Familiarity with any great thing removes our awe of it.
~L Frank Baum

You can’t always be in awe of someone’s talent, living with them.
~Yoko Ono

There’s people that are just in awe of what you do, and then there are people who just think it’s garbage. And I think there are people who are just uncomfortable seeing someone have fun with their job
~Todd Barry

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Great sci-fi has never shied from tackling the Big Questions, though really great sci-fi never forgets to entertain us along the way. Shock and awe applies to art, as well.
~Rick Yancey

To me, science fiction is about the sense of mystery, the sense of awe. Not ‘shock and awe’, just ‘awe.’
~J Michael Straczynski

We are all in the gutter, but some of us are looking at the stars.
~Oscar Wilde

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Two gentle stories, the foreign language spoken is English-accent

~NITVShorts:  New Boy   (11:32)   learning it
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FdeioVndUhs

~

~NITVShorts:  The Attendant   (11:50)   earning it
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R1HyisEtjsM

~~

When we’re infused with either enthusiasm or awe or fondness, it changes what we see. It changes what we remember.
~Robert Legato

Create experiences that leave you in awe, for these will be the highlights of your life.
~Ryan Blair

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If the grandfather of the grandfather of Jesus had known what was hidden within him, he would have stood humble and awe-struck before his soul.
~Khalil Gibran

It is awesome to feel you are carrying on the family name.
~Daniel Day-Lewis

I really like being pregnant. Not that there aren’t things I don’t love, but when I think about what my body is doing – creating a child – it just blows my mind. I’m in awe of the process and science.
~Emily Deschanel

The production of souls is the secret of unfathomable depth.
~Victor Hugo

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We teach children how to measure and how to weigh. We fail to teach them how to revere, how to sense wonder and awe.
~Harold S Kushner

If I had influence with the good fairy who is supposed to preside over the christening of all children I should ask that her gift to each child in the world be a sense of wonder so indestructible that it would last throughout life
~Rachel Carson

By cutting ourselves off from the rest of creation, we are left bereft of awe and wonder and therefore of reverence and gratitude. We violate our very beings, and we have nothing but trivia to teach our young.
~Matthew Fox

The job of a teacher is to excite in the young a boundless sense of curiosity about life, so that the growing child shall come to apprehend it with an excitement tempered by awe and wonder.
~John Garrett

A schoolmaster should have an atmosphere of awe, and walk wonderingly, as if he was amazed at being himself.
~Walter Bagehot

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I really believed that the priests were acquainted with my thoughts; and often stood in great awe of them. They often told me they had power to strike me dead at any moment.
~Maria Monk

I would rather have a mind opened by wonder than one closed by belief.
~Gerry Spence

The pursuit of truth and beauty is a sphere of activity in which we are permitted to remain children all our lives.
~Albert Einstein

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The most unfathomable schools and sages have never attained to the gravity which dwells in the eyes of a baby of three months old. It is the gravity of astonishment at the universe, and astonishment at the universe is not mysticism, but a transcendent common-sense. The fascination of children lies in this: that with each of them all things are remade, and the universe is put again upon its trial.
~Gilbert K Chesterton

Home is that youthful region where a child is the only real living inhabitant. Parents, siblings, and neighbors are mysterious apparitions who come, go, and do strange unfathomable things in and around the child, the region’s only enfranchised citizen.
~Maya Angelou

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MUSIC:

I haven’t experienced love at first sight yet. I’ve seen very, very beautiful girls and been awestruck but never love at first sight.
~Tristan Wilds

Don’t be upset. Don’t listen to me. I only meant that I am jealous of a dark, unconscious element, something irrational, unfathomable. I am jealous of your toilet articles, of the drops of sweat on your skin, of the germs in the air you breathe… I know this must seem obscure and confused, but I can’t say it more clearly. I love you madly, irrationally, infinitely.
~Boris Pasternak

Love is the river of life in this world. Think not that ye know it who stand at the little tinkling rill, the first small fountain. Not until you have gone through the rocky gorges, and not lost the stream; not until you nave gone through the meadow, and the stream has widened and deepened until fleets could ride on its bosom; not until beyond the meadow you have come to the unfathomable ocean, and poured your treasures into its depths — not until then can you know what love is.
~Henry Ward Beecher

This was a kind of dying. Losing the woman I truly had loved, and still loved more than anything, was just unfathomable. To me, she was the world.
~Andres Lokko

~

Who can be sure that Jean Valjean had not been on the verge of losing heart and giving up the struggle? In loving he recovered his strength. But the truth is that he was no less vulnerable than Cosette. He protected her and she sustained him. Thanks to him she could go forward into life, and thanks to her he could continue virtous. He was the child’s support and she his mainstay. Sublime, unfathomable marvel of the balance of destiny!
~Victor Hugo

You are my country, Desdemona. … My Egypt. My hot, harrowing desert and my cool, verdant Nile, infinitely lovely and unfathomable and sustaining.
~Connie Brockway

Fundamentally the male artist approximates more to the psychology of woman, who, biologically speaking, is a purely creative being and whose personality has been as mysterious and unfathomable to the man as the artist has been to the average person.
~Beatrice M Hinkle

The reason why you know more funny dudes than funny chicks is that dudes are funnier than chicks. If my daughter has a mediocre sense of humor, I’m just gonna tell her, ‘Be a staff writer for a sitcom. Because they’ll have to hire you, they can’t really fire you, and you don’t have to produce that much. It’ll be awesome.
~Adam Carolla

It used to be that you had to make female TV characters perfect so no one would be offended by your ‘portrayal’ of women. Even when I started out on ‘The Office’ eight years ago, we could write our male characters funny and flawed, but not the women. And now, thankfully, it’s completely different.
~Mindy Kaling

There shall be poets! When woman’s unmeasured bondage shall be broken, when she shall live for and through herself, man — hitherto detestable — having let her go, she, too, will be poet! Woman will find the unknown!
~Arthur Rimbaud

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What if one happens to be possessed of a heart that can’t be trusted? What if the heart, for its own unfathomable reasons, leads one willfully and in a cloud of unspeakable radiance away from health, domesticity, civic responsibility and strong social connections and all the blandly-held common virtues and instead straight towards a beautiful flare of ruin, self-immolation, disaster?
~Donna Tartt

When men hear women want a commitment, they think it means commitment to a romantic relationship, but that’s not it. It’s a commitment to not floating around anymore. I want a guy who is entrenched in his own life. Entrenched is awesome.
~Mindy Kaling

Woman is the unfathomable, incalculable mystery, the problem we men can never hope to solve.
~P G Wodehouse

Is it truly so unfathomable, that an imperfect girl might be perfectly loved?
~Tessa Dare

For small creatures such as we the vastness is bearable only through love.
~Carl Sagan

Movies can provide tear-inducing or comically-entertaining representations of love, but many agree that its deeper conflicting complexities often seem unfathomable.
~Aberjhani

Love involves a peculiar unfathomable combination of understanding and misunderstanding.
~Diane Arbus

After one moment of gripped immobility, the queen bent to kiss the king lightly on one closed eyelid, then on the other. She said, ‘I love your eyes.’ She kissed him on either cheek, near the small lobe of his ear. ‘I love your ears, and I love’—she paused as she kissed him gently on the lips— ‘every single one of your ridiculous lies.’ The king opened his eyes and smiled at the queen in a companionship that was as unassailable as it was unfathomable.
~Megan Whalen Turner

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~Spacey Blak:  Wonder Boy, ft. Debbie Aramide   (4:08)   amateur hero
https://vimeo.com/65923131

~

~Natalie Merchant:  Wonder   (5:05)   small venue concert
https://vimeo.com/86875796

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~Moon Tooth:  Awe At All Angles   (4:15)   all angles inclusive, tight guitar
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qhFxl98VEOs

~

~Stevie Wonder & Diana Ross:  For Once in My Life   (3:02)   once upon a time
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pbTAcd-I-l0

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~Laime Pilniga:  Awe   (3:25)   wounded eyes fuel the song
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NlGf_cT61M4

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~DJ Manzo, ft. Presh and Chronix:  Awe Mah   (3:49)   South African joyful
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XHYP8Gs_u5I

~

How Great Thou Are — a hymn
~Hillsong (4:10)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8wMN12KXZpE

-or-

~Vince Gill & Carrie Underwood   (5:41)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IJ12Fd0AlAw

~~

The bassoon is one of my favorite instruments. It has a medieval aroma, like the days when everything used to sound like that. Some people crave baseball…I find this unfathomable, but I can easily understand why a person could get excited about playing the bassoon.
~Frank Zappa

The meaning of song goes deep. Who in logical words can explain the effect music has on us? A kind of inarticulate, unfathomable speech, which leads us to the edge of the infinite, and lets us for a moment gaze into that!
~Thomas Carlyle

The feeling of awed wonder that science can give us is one of the highest experiences of which the human psyche is capable. It is a deep aesthetic passion to rank with the finest that music and poetry can deliver.
~Richard Dawkins

Science cannot tell us a word about why music delights us, of why and how an old song can move us to tears. Science is reticent too when it is a question of the great Unity – the One of Parmenides – of which we all somehow form part, to which we belong. The most popular name for it in our time is God – with a capital ‘G’.
~Erwin Schrodinger

To reflect upon the [black hole’s] event horizon is a great deal more awe-inspiring than a burning bush or a wooden statue that weeps or pees or bleeds.
~Christopher Hitchens

Do not, I beg you, look for anything behind phenomena. They are themselves their own lesson.
~Goethe

How is it that hardly any major religion has looked at science and concluded, “This is better than we thought! The Universe is much bigger than our prophets said, grander, more subtle, more elegant?
~Carl Sagan

~

To science, not even the bark of a tree or a drop of pond water is dull or a handful of dirt banal. They all arouse awe and wonder.
~Jane Jacobs

A woodland in full color is awesome as a forest fire, in magnitude at least, but a single tree is like a dancing tongue of flame to warm the heart.
~Hal Borland

To early man, trees were objects of awe and wonder. The mystery of their growth, the movement of their leaves and branches, the way they seemed to die and come again to life in spring, the sudden growth of the plant from the seed – all these appeared to be miracles as indeed they still are, miracles of nature!
~Ruskin Bond

A leaf fluttered in through the window this morning, as if supported by the rays of the sun, a bird settled on the fire escape, joy in the task of coffee, joy accompanied me as I walked.
~Anais Nin

~

We do not associate the idea of antiquity with the ocean, nor wonder how it looked a thousand years ago, as we do of the land, for it was equally wild and unfathomable always.
~Henry David Thoreau

“The world is but a Thought,” said he:
“The vast unfathomable sea
Is but a Notion-unto me.”
~Lewis Carroll

Unfathomable mind, now beacon, now sea.
~Samuel Beckett

We need the tonic of wildness…At the same time that we are earnest to explore and learn all things, we require that all things be mysterious and unexplorable, that land and sea be indefinitely wild, unsurveyed and unfathomed by us because unfathomable. We can never have enough of nature.
~Henry David Thoreau

Earth’s crammed with heaven,
And every common bush afire with God:
But only he who sees takes off his shoes.
~Elizabeth Barrett Browning

And those who were seen dancing were thought to be insane by those who could not hear the music.
~Friedrich Nietzsche

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inexcusably bad, in poor taste, simply awful

~~

The Internet is like a herd of performing elephants with diarrhoea – massive, difficult to re-direct, awe-inspiring, entertaining, and a source of mind-boggling amounts of excrement when you least expect it.
~Gene Spafford

Often people display a curious respect for a man drunk, rather like the respect of simple races for the insane… There is something awe-inspiring in one who has lost all inhibitions.
~F Scott Fitzgerald

~

One can only be in awe of the creativity of chocolate marketers. My take is that if there is a health benefit, it is small.
~Marion Nestle

Awe consumes any brand that ignites it.
~Cynthia Ozick

~

Man is a simple being, and however rich, varied, and unfathomable he may be, the cycle of his situations is soon run through.
~Goethe

The further one advances in experience, the closer one comes to the unfathomable; the more one learns to utilize experience, the more one recognizes that the unfathomable is of no practical value.
~Goethe

The world is vast, beautiful, and fascinating, even awe-inspiring – but impersonal. It demands nothing of me, and allows me to demand nothing of it.
~Herbert Simon

~

Facing the kitsch aesthetic is the unfathomable world of myths.
~Saul Friedlander

That shoreline where the island of knowing meets the unfathomable sea of our own being is the landscape of myth.
~William Irwin Thompson

Because philosophy arises from awe, a philosopher is bound in his way to be a lover of myths and poetic fables. Poets and philosophers are alike in being big with wonder.
~Thomas Aquinas

Isn’t this enough? Just this world? Just this beautiful, complex wonderfully unfathomable world? How does it so fail to hold our attention that we have to diminish it with the invention of cheap, man-made myths and monsters?
~Tim Minchin

The larger the island of knowledge, the longer the shoreline of wonder.
~Ralph Washington Sockman

~~

~~

You do not know the unfathomable cowardice of humanity…servile in the face of force, pitiless in the face of weakness, implacable before blunders, indulgent before crimes…and patient to the point of martyrdom before all the violences of bold despotism.
~Niccolo Machiavelli

Americans have become conditioned to believe the world is a gray place without absolutes; this is because we’re simultaneously cowardly and arrogant. We don’t know the answers, so we assume they must not exist. But they do exist. They are unclear and/or unfathomable, but they’re out there.
~Chuck Klosterman

The first act of awe, when man was struck with the beauty or wonder of Nature, was the first spiritual experience.
~Henryk Skolimowski

Whence come I and whither go I? That is the great unfathomable question, the same for every one of us. Science has no answer to it.
~Max Planck

Scientific views end in awe and mystery, lost at the edge in uncertainty, but they appear to be so deep and so impressive that the theory that it is all arranged as a stage for God to watch man’s struggle for good and evil seems inadequate.
~Richard P Feynman

Guess what: God created beings not to act in a morality play but to
experience what is unfathomable, to elicit what can become, to descend
into the darkness of creation and reveal it to him, to mourn and celebrate enigma and possibility. The universe is a whirling dervish, not a hanging judge in robes.
~Richard Grossinger

It is possible to become discouraged about the injustice we see everywhere. But God did not promise us that the world would be humane and just. He gives us the gift of life and allows us to choose the way we will use our limited time on earth. It is an awesome opportunity.
~Cesar Chavez

~

It’s a mystery. That’s the first thing that interests me about the idea of God. If there is one, it’s mysterious and powerful and awesome to even consider the concept, and you have to take it seriously.
~Stephen King

Now when the ancient Egyptians, awestruck and wondering, turned their eyes to the heavens, they concluded that two gods, the sun and the moon, were primeval and eternal; and they called the former Osiris, the latter Isis.
~Diodorus Siculus

Our evangelical culture tends to take the awesome reality of a transcendent god who is worthy to be feared and downsize Him so He could fit into our “buddy system.” The way we talk about Him, the way we pray, and, more strikingly, the way we live shows that we have somehow lost our sense of being appropriately awestruck… If God were to show up visibly, many of us think we’d run up to Him and high-five Him for the good things He has done.
~Joseph Stowell

The infinity of God is not mysterious, it is only unfathomable; not concealed, but incomprehensible; it is a clear infinity, the darkness of the pure unsearchable sea.
~John Ruskin

Awe enables us to see in the world intimations of the divine, to sense in small things the beginning of infinite significance, to sense the ultimate in the common and the simple, to feel in the rush of the passing the stillness of the eternal.
~Abraham Joshua Heschel

~

We worship an awesome God in the Blue States, and we don’t like federal agents poking around our libraries in the Red States. We coach Little League in the Blue States and have gay friends in the Red States.
~Barack Obama

A Grand Design we couldn’t see because we were part of it. A Grand Design we only got occasional, fleeting glimpses of. A Grand Design involving the entire course of history and all of time and space that, for some unfathomable reason, chose to work out its designs with cats and croquet mallets and penwipers, to say nothing of the dog. And a hideous piece of Victorian artwork. And us.
~Connie Willis

God loves human beings. God loves the world. Not an ideal human, but human beings as they are; not an ideal world, but the real world. What we find repulsive in their opposition to God, what we shrink back from with pain and hostility, namely, real human beings, the real world, this is for God the ground of unfathomable love.
~Dietrich Bonhoeffer

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@Writers Platform:

Here’s a funny question: What is your favorite word? Think about it —maybe it’s a word that makes you absolutely happy, or a word that sounds gloriously beautiful, or a word that evokes awe and wonder. Maybe you are reminded of a great time when you hear it, or maybe it represents your life’s dream. So, what is it? What is your favorite word of all words? Thought about it yet? Good. And now, think why.
~Vera Nazarian

Something unfathomable lies behind every thought … something for which there aren’t any words.
~Peter Weiss

Words today are like the shells and rope of seaweed which a child brings home glistening from the beach and which in an hour have lost their luster.
~Cyril Connolly

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In my school, the library was forbidden. I was accused of turning on the radiator so that the [class]room was uninhabitable and the ceiling came down below; I’m pretty sure I didn’t do it. But then we were moved to the library. And there was a really boring history thing, about the Spanish Armada: how could you make that boring?! So I reached my hand out, and slid a book off to read under the desk, and it opened at King Lear Act Four Scene Six. I was astounded. I’d never seen language like it. I was awestruck. I think that may be one reason why I got involved in theatre.
~Keith Johnstone

When Dr. King was murdered, I had no idea who he was. But as soon as I heard his words on television that night when I was 9 years old, I was dumbstruck, awestruck by their power.
~Michael Eric Dyson

The man who comes back through the Door in the Wall will never be quite the same as the man who went out. He will be wiser but less sure, happier but less self-satisfied, humbler in acknowledging his ignorance yet better equipped to understand the relationship of words to things
~Aldous Huxley

~

Batty as it sounds, subject and style may choose artists through some unfathomable cosmic means. How else to explain that even artists who enjoy what they do can be perplexed or even horrified that they’re doing it?
~Jerry Saltz

It’s a pity if someone…has to console himself for the wreck of his days with the notion that somehow his voice, his work embodies the deepest, most obscure, freshest, rawest oyster of reality in the unfathomable refrigerator of the heart’s ocean, but I am such a one, and there you have it.
~Leonard Cohen

There’s a unique bond of trust between readers and authors that I don’t believe exists in any other art form; as a reader, I trust a novelist to give me his or her best effort, however flawed.
~Dan Simmons

The role of the writer is not simply to arrange Being according to his own lights; he must also serve as a medium to Being and remain open to its often unfathomable dictates. This is the only way the work can transcend its creator and radiate its meaning…
~Vaclav Havel

Prose — it might be speculated — is discourse; poetry ellipsis. Prose is spoken aloud; poetry overheard. The one is presumably articulate and social, a shared language, the voice of “communication”; the other is private, allusive, teasing, sly, idiosyncratic as the spider’s delicate web, a kind of witchcraft unfathomable to ordinary minds.
~Joyce Carol Oates

The theologians gather dust upon the shelves of my library but the poets are stained with my fingers and blotted by my tears.
~John Haynes Holmes

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Prewritten Prompt:   awe

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No sight is more provocative of awe than is the night sky.
~Llewelyn Powys

Looking at these stars suddenly dwarfed my own troubles and all the gravities of terrestrial life. I thought of their unfathomable distance, and the slow inevitable drift of their movements out of the unknown past into the unknown future.
~H G Wells

You are confronted with abysses of time that are, in a way, unfathomable. You see a painting in charcoal of reindeer and it was left unfinished and somebody else finished it. But through radio carbon dating we know that the next one completed the painting 5,000 years later. You’re just blown away by the notion of passage of time. We have no relationship to that kind of depth of time.
~Werner Herzog

There is some awe mixed with the joy of our surprise, when this poet, who lived in some past world, two or three hundred years ago, says that which lies close to my own soul, that which I also had well nigh thought and said.
~Ralph Waldo Emerson

Think with awe on the slow and quiet power of time.
~Friedrich Schiller

~

The most impactful place that I’ve been to where I was just completely awestruck, happy, moved is Victoria Falls between Zambia and Zimbabwe. It is probably the most beautiful and romantic place in the world.
~Hill Harper

Awe is the emotion of self-transcendence.
~Jonathan Haidt

Joy draws its nourishment from quietness and from the unfathomable.
~Dietrich Bonhoeffer

Silence before being born, silence after death: life is nothing but noise between two unfathomable silences.
~Isabel Allende

Let us seek to fathom those things that are fathomable and reserve those things which are unfathomable for reverence in quietude.
~Goethe

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THE EXERCISE

The Dream

Bow to the venerable
deserving of awe
Serving the vulnerable
unprotected by law
Protest unequal evils
heeding the call
Soft social upheaval
avoiding the brawl
Political evolution
without revolution
Stately procession
encompassing all

~

Dual Doggerels Dueling 1 & 2

Chance Wasted

Abandoning dreams of recovering Eden
Abode inherited rooted at birth
Homo’s only, own and lonely world
Sapiens’ home née planet Earth
Chased and unchaste, fallen, retreating
Coping with failure, lessons unlearned
Playing it brash, bold and unchastened
Garden crashing, trashed then burned
Raping the woods, set the forests on fire
Stench of oil replacing than scent of pine
Nightmare prevailing instead of awe
Still, after it’s gone, the memory is mine

—

Fanfare

First down touchdown, reaching the moon
Wonder cheering the sport, science’s boon
Orbiting, landing, scoring on Mars
Awe earns the win, next goal the stars

~

Conditions Apply

Having lived with wonder all my days
with just enough resource in laughter and tears
to continue it

Yet if awe should fade or reserves run dry
I’ll consider it permission to bid it farewell
say goodnight and end it

—

Pending

Ready, nay, excited
Just moments away
I’ll have all my answers
I’ll know the Afterwards
In awe of that instant
Preparations in order
Mere seconds left
They throw the switch…

~

Perspective

Redshot South Pacific sunset
The peerless Taj Mahal
Blue whale swimming beside me
A deafening roar, Niagara Falls
Hubble’s view a stellar heavens
Teeming China, its insular wall
Yet you unclothed here before me
Inspires my awe most of all

~ ~

The knowledgeable person lives with a question mark, and the man of awe and wonder lives with an exclamation mark.
~Rajneesh

Emotion is often what we rely upon to carry us across the unfathomable voids in our intelligence.
~Bryant H McGill

~

No man is quite so much a hero in the dark as in broad daylight, in solitude as in society, in the gloom of the churchyard as in the blaze of the drawing-room. The season and the place may be such as to oppress the stoutest heart with a mysterious awe, which, if not fear, is near akin to it.
~William H Prescott

Don’t call it uncertainty — call it wonder.
~Rajneesh

~

You are so terribly nimble, so clever. I distrust your cleverness. You make a wonderful pattern, everything is in its place, it looks convincingly clear, too clear. And meanwhile, where are you? Not on the clear surface of your ideas, but you have already sunk deeper, into darker regions, so that one only thinks one has been given all your thoughts, one only imagines you have emptied yourself in that clarity. But there are layers and layers — you’re bottomless, unfathomable. Your clearness is deceptive. You are the thinker who arouses most confusion in me, most doubt, most disturbance.
~Anais Nin

Conscience is but a word that cowards use, devised at first to keep the strong in awe.
~William Shakespeare

~

I’m in awe of the universe, but I don’t necessarily believe there’s an intelligence or agent behind it. I do have a passion for the visual in religious rituals, though, even though they may be completely empty and bereft of substance. The incense is powerful and provocative, whether Buddhist or Catholic.
~David Bowie

Awe and respect are two different things.
~Oliver Reed

~

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.
~Michael Shermer

Men sunk in the greatest darkness imaginable retain some sense and awe of the Deity.
~John Tillotson

A certain pride, a certain awe, withheld him from offering to God even one prayer at night, though he knew it was in God’s power to take away his life while he slept and hurl his soul hellward ere he could beg for mercy.
~James Joyce

~

With respect to duels, indeed, I have my own ideas. Few things in this so surprising world strike me with more surprise. Two little visual spectra of men, hovering with insecure enough cohesion in the midst of the unfathomable, and to dissolve therein, at any rate, very soon, make pause at the distance of twelve paces asunder; whirl around, and simultaneously by the cunningest mechanism, explode one another into dissolution; and, offhand, become air, and non-extant – the little spitfires!
~Thomas Carlyle

~

There are two words that, when spoken, have the most unfathomable power to completely change your life. Two words which, when they pass your lips, will be the cause of bringing absolute joy and happiness to you. Two words that will create miracles in your life. Two words that will wipe out negativity. Two words that will bring you abundance in all things. Two words which, when uttered and sincerely felt, will summon all the forces and vibrations in the Universe to move all things for you. The only thing standing between you, happiness, and the life of your dreams is two words THANK YOU!
~Rhonda Byrne

Gratitude bestows reverence, allowing us to encounter everyday epiphanies, those transcendent moments of awe that change forever how we experience life and the world.
~John Milton

~

Great sci-fi has never shied from tackling the Big Questions, though really great sci-fi never forgets to entertain us along the way. Shock and awe applies to art, as well.
~Rick Yancey

To me, science fiction is about the sense of mystery, the sense of awe. Not ‘shock and awe’, just ‘awe.’
~J Michael Straczynski

~

We are all in the gutter, but some of us are looking at the stars.
~Oscar Wilde

I think this is how we are supposed to be in the world — present and in awe.
~Anne Lamott

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Quotes harvested from:  https://azquotes.com,  https://bqotd.com,  https://www.quotegarden.com, https://wiseoldsayings.com

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Video harvest:  https://vimeo.com,  https://youtube.com

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