The winds with wonder whist.
Smoothly the waters kisst. [ Milton ]
A wise man is a great wonder. [ Proverb ]
No wonder lasts over three days. [ Proverb ]
Without wonder there is no faith. [ Jean Paul ]
The white wonder of Juliet's hands. [ Shakespeare ]
Wonder is the daughter of Ignorance. [ Proverb ]
Can such things be,
And overcome us like a summer's cloud,
Without our special wonder? [ William Shakespeare, Macbeth ]
Ay, marriage is the life-long miracle,
The self-begetting wonder, daily fresh. [ Charles Kingsley ]
I wonder did you ever count
The value of one human fate;
Or sum the infinite amount
Of one heart's treasure, and the weight
Of life's one venture, and the whole
Concentrate purpose of a soul. [ Adelaide A. Procter ]
I wonder if the sap is stirring yet.
If wintry birds are dreaming of a mate.
If frozen snowdrops feel as yet the sun,
And crocus fires are kindling one by one. [ Christina G. Rossetti ]
Here lies the body of Jonathan Near
Whose mouth it stretched from ear to ear.
Tread softly, stranger, o'er this wonder,
For if he yawns, you're gone, by thunder! [ Epitaph ]
Fine words! I wonder where yon stole them. [ Swift ]
Here I lie, and no wonder I am dead,
For the wheel of a wagon went over my head. [ Miscellaneous epitaph ]
Unprovoked and calm
You reason well, see as you ought to see,
And wonder at the madness of mankind:
Seized with the common rage, you soon forget
The speculations of your wiser hours. [ Armstrong ]
His words seem'd oracles
That pierced their bosoms; and each man would turn
And gaze in wonder on his neighbour's face,
That with the like dumb wonder answer'd him.
You could have heard
The beating of your pulses while he spoke. [ George Croly ]
All wonder is the effect of novelty upon ignorance. [ Johnson ]
While words of learned length, and thundering sound,
Amazed the gazing rustics ranged around;
And still they gazed, and still the wonder grew,
That one small head should carry all he knew. [ Goldsmith ]
No wonder if he break his shins that walks in the dark. [ Proverb ]
It is through the feeling of wonder that men philosophise. [ Aristotle ]
Lord! I wonder what fool it was that first invented kissing. [ Swift ]
Strange an astrologer should die without one wonder in the sky. [ Swift ]
For his dreams,
I wonder he's so simple to trust the mockery of unquiet slumbers. [ William Shakespeare ]
Through the arts the wonder of the ignorant multitude is excited. [ Anaxilaus ]
A wonder lasts but nine days, and then the puppy's eyes are open. [ Proverb ]
A horse stumbles that hath four legs. (What wonder then, if two stumble.) [ English Proverb, collected by George Herbert ]
I never wonder to see men wicked, but I often wonder to see them not ashamed. [ Swift ]
I'm not one of those who can see the cat in the dairy and wonder what she's come after. [ George Eliot ]
No wonder is greater than any other wonder, and if once explained, it ceases to be a wonder. [ Leigh Hunt ]
It is the common wonder of all men how among so many millions of faces there should be none alike. [ Sir Thomas Browne ]
Where such radiant lights have shone, no wonder if her cheeks be grown sunburnt with lustre of their own. [ John Cleaveland ]
How full of error is the judgment of mankind! They wonder at results when they are ignorant of the reasons. [ Metastasio ]
I wonder how it is that so cheerful-looking a tree as the willow should ever have become associated with ideas of sadness. [ Hamerton ]
Sir, a woman's preaching is like a dog standing on his hinder legs. It is not done well, but you wonder to see it done at all. [ Johnson ]
Truly unhappy is the man who leaves undone what he can do, and undertakes what he does not understand; no wonder he comes to grief. [ Johann Wolfgang von Goethe ]
A beautiful and chaste woman is the perfect workmanship of God, and the true glory of angels, the rare miracle of earth, and the sole wonder of the world. [ Hermes ]
To be able simply to say of a man he has character, is not only saying much of him, but extolling him; for this is a rarity which excites respect and wonder. [ Johann Wolfgang von Goethe ]
The shortest and surest way to prove a work possible is strenuously to set about it; and no wonder if that proves it possible that for the most part makes it so. [ South ]
A man does not wonder at what he sees frequently, even though he be ignorant of the reason. If anything happens which he has not seen before, he calls it a prodigy. [ Cicero ]
No wonder we are all more or less pleased with mediocrity, since it leaves us at rest, and gives the same comfortable feeling as when one associates with his equals. [ Johann Wolfgang von Goethe ]
Can we wonder that men perish and are forgotten, when their noblest and most enduring works decay? Death comes even to monumental structures, and oblivion rests on the most illustrious names. [ Ausonius ]
What a person praises is perhaps a surer standard, even, than what he condemns, of his character, information, and abilities. No wonder, then, that in this prudent country most people are so shy of praising anything. [ Hare ]
Dreams ought to produce no conviction whatever on philosophical minds. If we consider how many dreams are dreamt every night, and how many events occur every day, we shall no longer wonder at those accidental coincidences which ignorance mistakes for verifications. [ Colton ]
Praise consists in the love of God, in wonder at the goodness of God, in recognition of the gifts of God, in seeing God in all things He gives us, ay, and even in the things that He refuses to us; so as to see our whole life in the light of God; and seeing this, to bless Him, adore Him, and glorify Him. [ Manning ]
Men that look no further than their outsides, think health an appurtenance unto life, and quarrel with their constitutions for being sick; but I that have examined the parts of man, and know upon what tender filaments that fabric hangs, do wonder that we are not always so; and considering the thousand doors that lead to death, do thank my God that we can die but once. [ Sir Thomas Browns ]
Surely no man can reflect, without wonder, upon the vicissitudes of human life arising from causes in the highest degree accidental and trifling. If you trace the necessary concatenation of human events a very little way back, you may perhaps discover that a person's very going in or out of a door has been the means of coloring with misery or happiness the remaining current of his life. [ Lord Greville ]
The mind of the greatest man on earth is not so independent of circumstances as not to feel inconvenienced by the merest buzzing noise about him; it does not need the report of a cannon to disturb his thoughts. The creaking of a vane or a pully is quite enough. Do not wonder that he reasons ill just now; a fly is buzzing by his ear; it is quite enough to unfit him for giving good counsel. [ Pascal ]
The whole difference between a man of genius and other men, it has been said a thousand times, and most truly, is that the first remains in great part a child, seeing with the large eyes of children, in perpetual wonder, not conscious of much knowledge - conscious, rather, of infinite ignorance, and yet infinite power; a fountain of eternal admiration, delight, and creative force within him meeting the ocean of visible and governable things around him. [ Ruskin ]
Today it is all of sixty years since I began to smoke the limit. I have never bought cigars with life-belts around them. I early found that those were too expensive for me: I have always bought cheap cigars - reasonably cheap, at any rate. Sixty years ago they cost me four dollars a barrel, but my taste has improved, latterly, and I pay seven, now. Six or seven. Seven, I think. Yes; it's seven. But that includes the barrel. I often have smoking-parties at my house; but the people that come have always just taken the pledge. I wonder why that is? [ Mark Twain, Seventieth Birthday speech ]
All the performances of human art, at which we look with praise or wonder, are instances of the resistless force of perseverance; it is by this that the quarry becomes a pyramid, and that distant countries are united by canals. If a man was to compare the effect of a single stroke of a pickaxe, or of one impression of the spade, with the general design and last result, he would be overwhelmed with the sense of their disproportion; yet those petty operations, incessantly continued, in time surmount the greatest difficulties, and mountains are leveled and oceans bounded, by the slender force of human beings. [ Dr. Johnson ]
This is my seventieth birthday, and I wonder if you all rise to the size of that proposition, realizing all the significance of that phrase, seventieth birthday. The seventieth birthday! It is the time of life when you arrive at a new and awful dignity; when you may throw aside the decent reserves which have oppressed you for a generation and stand unafraid and unabashed upon your seven-terraced summit and look down and teach--unrebuked. You can tell the world how you got there. It is what they all do. You shall never get tired of telling by what delicate arts and deep moralities you climbed up to that great place. You will explain the process and dwell on the particulars with senile rapture. I have been anxious to explain my own system this long time, and now at last I have the right. [ Mark Twain, Seventieth Birthday speech ]