We are perishing for want of wonder, not for want of wonders.

Mankind will not perish for want of information; but only for want of appreciation. The beginning of our happiness lies in the understanding that life without wonder is not worth living . What we lack is not a will to believe but a will to wonder.

The world will never starve for want of wonders; but only for want of wonder.

If you try to save wisdom until the world is wise, Father, the world will never have it.

I need a world filled with wonder, with awe, with awful things. I couldn't exist in a world devoid of marvels, even if the marvels are terrible marvels. Even if they frighten me to consider them.

I feel that fear is negative wonder. It is the point at which wonder begins to consume itself and scrape off the essence of things.

We have educated ourselves into a world from which wonder, and he fear and dread and splendor and freedom of wonder have been banished. Of course wonder is costly. You couldn't incorporate it into a modern state, beacuse it is the antithesis of the anxiously worshiped security which is what a modern state is asked to give. Wonder is marvellous but it is also cruel, cruel, cruel. It is undemocratic, discriminatory and pitiless.

When age fell upon the world, and wonder went out of the minds of men; when grey cities reared to smoky skies tall towers grim and ugly, in whose shadow none might dream of the sun or of spring’s flowering meads; when learning stripped earth of her mantle of beauty, and poets sang no more save of twisted phantoms seen with bleared and inward-looking eyes; when these things had come to pass, and childish hopes had gone away forever, there was a man who travelled out of life on a quest into the spaces whither the world’s dreams had fled.

Without lies, humanity would perish of despair and boredom

And I despise your books, I despise wisdom and the blessings of this world. It is all worthless, fleeting, illusory, and deceptive, like a mirage. You may be proud, wise, and fine, but death will wipe you off the face of the earth as though you were no more than mice burrowing under the floor, and your posterity, your history, your immortal geniuses will burn or freeze together with the earthly globe.

Inspiration without intellect is useless and dangerous; and the poet will be able to perform few wonders, when he is astonished by wonders.

Nobody can conceive or imagine all the wonders there are unseen and unseeable in the world.

Once you lose that sense of wonder at being alive, you're pretty much on the way out...

If the world can no longer afford the luxury of natural beauty, then it will soon be overcome and destroyed by its own ugliness.