Let me keep my mind on what matters, which is my work, which is mostly standing still and learning to be astonished.

Awe is the feeling of being in the presence of something vast that transcends your understanding of the world.

Awe: An experience of such perceptual vastness you literally have to reconfigure your mental models of the world to assimilate it.

Were the sun to rise but once a year, we would all cry out…How glorious! Our hymns would rise up, our thanks would ascend. O God,…Give us new eyes…and vision to see the world anew.

What is it that breathes fire into the equations and makes a universe for them to describe? Why does the universe go to all the bother of existing?

Awe makes things new again. And that makes it the best drug in the world.

“People go abroad to wonder at the heights of mountains, at the huge waves of the sea, at the long courses of the rivers, at the vast compass of the ocean, at the circular motions of the stars, and they pass by themselves without wondering.”

All this he saw, for one moment breathless and intense, vivid on the morning sky; and still, as he looked, he lived; and still, as he lived, he wondered.

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.