The students are asked to rate their level of surprise on a five-point scale from ‘not surprised at all’ to ‘beyond shock’. Many describe feelings of total shock and numbness: a large majority indicate some level of surprise. He asks them: “Why were you surprised?

When surprise occurs, such as when the economy enters an unexpected recession or a conflict begins seemingly out the blue, the natural reaction is to immediately ask who made the “obvious” mistake. It is much easier to believe that our leaders are incompetent than to accept the less pleasant reality that ours is a world where uncertainty and surprise are the norm, not the exception.

We should only be astonished at still being able to be astonished.

It's not how the world is, but that it is, that is cause for astonishment.

I liked being half-educated; you were so much more surprised at everything when you were ignorant.

Life takes us by surprise and orders us to move toward the unknown -even when we don't want to and when we think we don't need to.

If you weren't surprised by your life you wouldn't be alive. Life is surprise.

Why would we ever be surprised when truth turns up in strange places?

What do we ever know that is higher than that power which, from time to time, seizes our lives, and reveals us startlingly to ourselves as creatures set down here bewildered? Why does death so catch us by surprise, and why love? We still and always want waking. We should amass half dressed in long lines like tribesmen and shake gourds at each other, to wake up; instead we watch television and miss the show.

War always takes you by surprise.

Sometimes people surprise us. People we believe we know.

The shock of the real. For a little while we are again able to see, as the child sees, a world of marvels. For a few moments we discover that nothing can be taken for granted, for if this ring of stone is marvelous then all which shaped it is marvelous, and our journey here on earth, able to see and touch and hear in the midst of tangible and mysterious things-in-themselves, is the most strange and daring of all adventures.

Relearn astonishment.

Let us look at our own shortcomings and leave other people’s alone; for those who live carefully ordered lives are apt to be shocked at everything and we might well learn very important lessons from the persons who shock us.