Top 100 Quotes About Astonishment
#1. Of all the marvelous works of God, perhaps the one angels view with the most supreme astonishment, is a proud man.
Charles Caleb Colton
#2. The worship of convention has never yet led to astonishment and a joyous leap in human potential.
Tama J. Kieves
#3. How good Mrs. West could have written such books and collected so many hard works, with all her family cares, is still more a matter of astonishment! Composition seems to me impossible with a head full of joints of mutton and doses of rhubarb.
Jane Austen
#4. I must be informed, that one of my great duties was, to obey the priests in all things; and this I soon learnt, to my utter astonishment and horror, was to live in the practice of criminal intercourse with them.
Maria Monk
#5. He produced a handkerchief - crisply folded - and handed it to her. She took it with silent astonishment. She'd never before known anyone who carried a handkerchief.
Cassandra Clare
#6. He answered the phone to his daughter with a broken but joyous heart, ready to speak with her of astonishment and wonder.
Patrick Ness
#7. I have a professional acquaintance whose recent eyelid job has left her with a permanent expression of such poleaxed astonishment that she looks at all times as if she had just read one of my books.
Florence King
#8. The story of my marriage, which is the great joy and astonishment of my life, is too much like a fairy tale, the German kind, unsweetened by Disney.
Ann Patchett
#9. A lot of what I am looking for is a moment of astonishment, he says. Those moments of pure consciousness when you involuntarily inhale and say 'Wow!'
Joel Meyerowitz
#10. When word came that Keith had died of cancer, Abel was astonished. That astonishment had to do with death, with the wiping out of a person, with the puzzlement that the man was simply gone.
Elizabeth Strout
#11. A quite specific astonishment stands at the beginning of every theological perception, inquiry, and thought.
Karl Barth
#12. To his astonishment and terror, and lasting delight, Sam saw a vast shape crash out of the trees and come careering down the slope.
J.R.R. Tolkien
#13. That which is not slightly distorted lacks sensible appeal; from which it follows that irregularity - that is to say, the unexpected, surprise and astonishment, are an essential part and characteristic of beauty.
Charles Baudelaire
#14. People who relate what they believe to be new and startling information like to have such information received with exclamations of astonishment and admiration.
Barbara Mertz
#15. I honestly felt no envy or resentment, only astonishment at how much of a world there was out there and how much of it others already knew. The agenda for self-cultivation that had been set for my classmates by their teachers and parents was something I'd have to develop for myself.
Sonia Sotomayor
#16. Attention, if sudden and close, graduates into surprise; and this into astonishment; and this into stupefied amazement.
Charles Darwin
#17. Max lifted his head, with great sorrow and great astonishment.
'There were stars,' He said. 'They burned my eyes.'
... from a Himmel street window, he wrote, the stars set fire to my eyes.
Markus Zusak
#18. The horror of the Hitler Experience was not that he perpetrated it on the human race, but that the human race allowed him to. The astonishment is not only that a Hitler came along, but also that so many others went along.
Neale Donald Walsch
#19. I have not professionally dealt in truth. Many when they come to die have spent all the truth that was in them, and enter the next world as paupers. I have saved up enough to make an astonishment there.
Mark Twain
#21. In alarming proportions the following words have disappeared from architectural publications: beauty, inspiration, magic, sorcery, enchantment, and also serenity, mystery, silence, privacy, astonishment. All of these have found a loving home in my soul.
Luis Barragan
#22. Life is shit, thought Pelletier in astonishment, all of it.
Roberto Bolano
#23. Central to everything I am and believe and have written is my astonishment, naive as it seems to people, that you can use human speech both to bless, to love, to build, to forgive and also to torture, to hate, to destroy and to annihilate.
George Steiner
#24. I sometimes think that the universe is a machine designed for the perpetual astonishment of astronomers.
Arthur C. Clarke
#25. This is what holidays, travels, vacations are about. It is not really rest or even leisure we chase. We strain to renew our capacity for wonder to shock ourselves into astonishment once again.
Shana Alexander
#26. It certainly strikes the beholder with astonishment, to perceive what vast difficulties can be overcome by the pigmy arms of little mortal man, aided by science and directed by superior skill.
Henry VIII Of England
#27. A day will come when men will discover an alphabet in the eyes of chalcedonies, in the markings of the moth, and will learn in astonishment that every spotted snail has always been a poem.
Alejo Carpentier
#28. In vain I have struggled. It will not do. My feelings will not be repressed. You must allow me to tell you how ardently I admire and love you." Elizabeth's astonishment was beyond expression.
Jane Austen
#29. There are some women who seem to be born without fear, just as there are people who are born without the ability to feel pain ... Providence appears to protect such women, maybe out of astonishment.
Margaret Atwood
#30. A man finds himself, to his great astonishment, suddenly existing, after thousands and thousands of years of non-existence: he lives for a little while; and then, again, comes an equally long period when he must exist no more. The heart rebels against this, and feels that it cannot be true.
Arthur Schopenhauer
#31. I was happy, I knew that. While experiencing happiness, we have difficulty in being conscious of it. Only when the happiness is past and we look back on it do we suddenly realize - sometimes with astonishment - how happy we had been.
Nikos Kazantzakis
#32. In the old days the worst part of my depression used to be the astonishment it caused me, the scandalized way in which I fought against it. Nowadays, on the other hand, I accept it cheerfully enough, like an old familiar friend.
Simone De Beauvoir
#33. Work is about a search for daily meaning as well as daily bread, for recognition as well as cash, for astonishment rather than torpor; in short, for a sort of life rather than a Monday through Friday sort of dying.
Studs Terkel
#34. I wanted to become the seeker, the aroused and passionate explorer, and it was better to go at it knowing nothing at all, always choosing the unmarked bottle, always choosing your own unproven method, armed with nothing but faith and a belief in astonishment.
Pat Conroy
#35. It was so simple that a flash of astonishment that felt like pain shot through her head. Education! That was it! It was education that made the difference! Education would pull them ut of the grame and dirt.
Betty Smith
#36. Almost one half of our time is spent in telling and hearing evil of one another ... and every hour brings forth something strange and terrible to fill up our discourse and our astonishment.
Laurence Sterne
#37. My reaction to your news is delighted astonishment that Lanark has been judged more popular than a book by Ian Rankin, and only regret that this wonderful honour had no money attached to it!
Christopher Brookmyre
#38. He stood still for a while and looked with astonishment at the cross. It surprised him that the sight of the cross released him of his burden. He looked and looked again as tears ran down his cheeks. (
John Bunyan
#39. Patriotic'? Dear, dear me!" Scarlett covered her mouth in mock astonishment. "I didn't know that was 'patriotism.' I believe what you intended has ruder names, though no well-bred Georgia lady would admit to knowing them.
Donald McCaig
#40. I was in the utmost astonishment, and roared so loud that they all ran back in a fright; and some of them, as I was afterwards told, were hurt with the falls they got by leaping from my sides upon the ground. However, they soon returned,
Jonathan Swift
#41. When my astonishment had worn off, and then my awe, and then my delight, I looked over at the Chief.
J.D. Salinger
#42. It's a razor's edge kind of innocence, which relies on a willingness to be duped for the sake of transcending ordinary experience, for the sake of astonishment.
Maud Casey
#43. Jonas," I told him, "you are not to listen any more to Cousin Charles," and Jonas regarded me in wide-eyed astonishment, that I should attempt to make decisions for him.
Shirley Jackson
#44. She had imagined Jace leaping from the bed in astonishment and gasping something like "Egad!" This didn't happen-largely, she suspected, because Jace had seen much stranger things in his life, and also because nobody used the word "Egad!" anymore. His eyes widened, though.
Cassandra Clare
#45. The worthless and offensive members of society, whose existence is a social pest, invariably think themselves the most ill-used people alive, and never get over their astonishment at the ingratitude and selfishness of their contemporaries.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
#46. People travel to marvel at the mountains, seas, rivers and stars and they pass right by themselves without astonishment.
Saint Augustine
#47. I can't believe it. You're finally mine," he said, astonishment in his voice."I was always yours.
Alison G. Bailey
#48. I don't know what God is, or what God had in mind when the universe was set in motion. In fact, I don't know if God even exists, although I confess that I sometimes find myself praying in times of great fear, or despair, or astonishment at a display of unexpected beauty.
Jon Krakauer
#49. I shall continue to explore-the astonishment of living.
Enid Bagnold
#50. My wife is a lovely, intelligent woman. She has the kind of curves that a man longs to find in his bed. I may not have been the first to wish to marry her, but I am the one who succeeded." To his total astonishment, he discovered that he meant every word.
Eloisa James
#51. The habits of craft, developed day in and day out over a working lifetime, create moments of astonishment, sublime and magical effects, precisely because the writer is not thinking overtly about making art.
Philip Gerard
#53. [D]avid began to argue, with the whining intonations of German astonishment, [ ... ] that everyone did it.
Vladimir Nabokov
#54. All in all, even some kinds of unexpected and ridiculous disappointments couldn't diminish the astonishment of being in this place with its spectacular nature.
Sahara Sanders
#55. The ideas are secondary to the primary premise of people's potential. I'm always in wonder and astonishment.
Jean Houston
#56. I find to my mixed astonishment that I do dream, but I didn't know it.
Theodore Sturgeon
#57. The wayfarer, Perceiving the pathway to truth, Was struck with astonishment. It was thickly grown with weeds. "Ha," he said, "I see that none has passed here In a long time." Later he saw that each weed Was a singular knife. "Well," he mumbled at last, "Doubtless there are other roads.
Stephen Crane
#58. I find to my astonishment that an unhappy marriage goes on being unhappy when it is over.
Rebecca West
#59. Doesn't private vice make a man unworthy of public office?" And now kindly Mrs. Albion looked at Mercy with genuine astonishment. "Well," she laughed, "if it did, there'd be no one to govern the land.
Edward Rutherfurd
#60. The mysteries of germination and flowering and fruiting engaged me from an early age, and the fact that by planting and working an ordinary patch of dirt you could in a few months' time harvest things of taste and value was, for me, nature's most enduring astonishment.
Michael Pollan
#62. Explanation separates us from astonishment, which is the only gateway to the incomprehensible.
Eugene Ionesco
#63. On the top of Cadair Idris,
I felt how happy a man might be
with a little money and a sane intellect,
and reflected with astonishment and pity
on the madness of the multitude.
Thomas Love Peacock
#64. Every spring is the only spring, a perpetual astonishment!
Ellis Peters
#65. Gordon Way's astonishment at being suddenly shot dead was nothing compared to his astonishment at what happened next.
Douglas Adams
#66. Each individual fact, taken by itself, can indeed arouse our curiosity or our astonishment, or be useful to us in its practical applications.
Hermann Von Helmholtz
#67. Money! Would that make it better for them? Yes, it would make it easy. But no, the money wouldn't be enough ... That means there must be something bigger than money ... An answer came to Katie. It was so simple that a flash of astonishment that felt like a pain shot through her head. Education!
Betty Smith
#68. Gratitude is the proper response for the absolute astonishment of getting to be alive, and aware, and an essential part of this crazy, sprawling story.
John Green
#69. At first he was very discouraging, to my astonishment then, but now I fancy he did it as a forlorn hope to check me; he said the whole idea was so disgusting that he could not entertain it for a moment.
Elizabeth Garrett Anderson
#70. To mourn, perhaps, is simply to prolong a posture of astonishment ...
Sara Suleri
#71. The portion of some is to have their afflictions by drops, now one drop and then another; but the dregs of the cup, the wine of astonishment, like a sweeping rain that leaveth no food, did the Lord prepare to be my portion.
Mary Rowlandson
#72. The power of gradually losing all feeling of strangeness or astonishment, and finally being pleased at anything, is called the historical sense or historical culture.
Friedrich Nietzsche
#73. It felt like the first time - twelve years old - hidden beneath a makeshift bed sheet tent and the astonishment (and not a little fear) that something came out of this fleshy joystick.
Katrina Monroe
#74. Into this life of cruel wonder sent,
Without a word to tell us what it meant,
Sent back again without a reason why -
Birth, life, and death - 'twas all astonishment.
Richard Le Gallienne
#75. For men, I think, love is a thing formed of equal parts lust and astonishment. The astonishment part women understand. The lust part they only think they understand.
Stephen King
#76. Cover your cocks," the men sailors sometimes joked. "They're always hunting sodomites."
"What do they do to sodomites?" Baru asked.
They looked at her with some astonishment. "Hot iron," one said. "Hssssssssss.
Seth Dickinson
#77. Max" Shauna greeted him, her voice a contented purr than she looked at me and her eyes grew cold. "Nina."
"She bitch from hell" I replied, Bitsy's head shot around and she looked at me with wide eyes, her fear had disappears, delighted astonishment in its place while Max grunted his amusement.
Kristen Ashley
#78. Mrs. Sliderskew was in an ecstasy of delight, rolling her head about, drawing up her skinny shoulders, and wrinkling her cadaverous face into so many and such complicated forms of ugliness, as awakened the unbounded astonishment and disgust even of Mr. Squeers.
Charles Dickens
#79. I've been a woman for a little over 50 years and have gotten over my initial astonishment. As for conducting an orchestra, that's a job where I don't think sex plays much part.
Nadia Boulanger
#80. To my astonishment I saw him standing at a table with Kitty Jones. It was the Kitty Jones bit that was astonishing. Not the table. Though it was very nicely polished.
Jonathan Stroud
#82. Elsie started to tell a lie she knew her husband wanted to hear. I don't love Buddy. I love you. To her astonishment, what came out was "I'm sorry." When she realized what she had said, she tried to tell her lie again but it still came out the same. "I'm sorry." "So
Homer Hickam
#83. Woman is shut up in a kitchen or in a boudoir, and astonishment is expressed that her horizon is limited. Her wings are clipped, and it is found deplorable that she cannot fly. Let but the future be opened to her, and she will no longer be compelled to linger in the present.
Simone De Beauvoir
#84. Never in my life had I felt so tangibly and with such astonishment that hate, by passing successively through comprehension, mercy, and sympathy, can be transformed into love.
Nikos Kazantzakis
#85. [I was advised] to read Jordan's 'Cours d'analyse'; and I shall never forget the astonishment with which I read that remarkable work, the first inspiration for so many mathematicians of my generation, and learnt for the first time as I read it what mathematics really meant.
G.H. Hardy
#86. Little by little, not without astonishment, I rediscovered the great names of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, who had been the master thinkers of my grandfather and other Mexican liberals. They did no offer me a doctrine or a catechism: they were and they are a source, an inspiration.
Octavio Paz
#87. Anthropology demands the open-mindedness with which one must look and listen, record in astonishment and wonder that which one would not have been able to guess.
Margaret Mead
#88. How many men are like trees, already strong and full grown, which are transplanted into some gardens, to the astonishment of those people who behold them in these fine spots, where they never saw them grow, and who neither know their beginning nor their progress!
Jean De La Bruyere
#89. I doubt that the phenomenon was any terrestrial reflection, because ... nothing of the kind has ever appeared before or since ... I was so unprepared for such a strange sight that I was really petrified with astonishment.
Clyde Tombaugh
#90. Magic is not about having a puzzle to solve. It's about creating a moment of awe and astonishment. And that can be a beautiful thing
David Blaine
#91. Call me Beth, please," she said. "I am no longer Mrs. Ackerley and have become, to our mutual astonishment, your sister." Hart
Jennifer Ashley
#92. Constant reminding ourselves that we not see with our eyes but with our synergetic eye-brain system working as a whole will produce constant astonishment as we notice, more and more often, how much of our perceptions emerge from our preconceptions.
David Eagleman
#93. You mean," said Arthur, "you mean you can see into my mind?"
"Yes," said Marvin.
Arthur stared in astonishment.
"And ... ?" he said.
"It amazes me how you can manage to live in anything that small.
Douglas Adams
#94. When I see kings lying by those who deposed them, ... or holy men that divided the world with their contests and disputes, I reflect with sorrow and astonishment on the little competitions, factions, and debates of mankind.
Joseph Addison
#95. PROBABILITY BY LIA PURPURA Most coincidents are not miraculous, but way more common than we think - it's the shiver of noticing being central in a sequence of events that makes so much seem wild and rare - because what if it wasn't? Astonishment's nothing without your consent.
Anonymous
#96. When I met Miller, for me it wasn't a question of wanting to meet him because it was Arthur Miller; it was a kind of astonishment that I could meet someone who was so deeply embedded in the psyche of my artistic development.
Simon McBurney
#97. We'll fight back, we'll fight back, we'll fight back, a man near Doctor Stockstill was chanting. Stockstill looked at him in astonishment, wondering who he would fight back against. Things were falling on them; did the man intend to fall back upward into the sky in some sort of revenge?
Philip K. Dick
#98. When I wake up, I wake to something worse. It's the astonishment of being myself
Jorge Luis Borges
#99. To my utter astonishment I saw an airship descending over my cow lot. It was occupied by six of the strangest beings I ever saw. They were jabbering together, but we could not understand a word they said ...
Alexander Hamilton
#100. The first time I set out to find George F. Kennan, in 1982, I had just turned 21, begun my final semester at Princeton University and noticed with astonishment that the senior thesis deadline had crept to within four months.
Barton Gellman
