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
The way to do research is to attack the facts at the point of greatest astonishment.
Celia Green
In recent years there's been a lot of philosophical theorising about how important magic is, and how it takes us back to a childlike state of astonishment. I think all this is just nonsense. Magic isn't meaningful or important other than how you're performing it in that moment.
Derren Brown
I realised a little bit to my astonishment that I can give a lecture for a thousand people, and there will be this tumultuous applause, so, you know, I have the feeling well, it can't be all that bad.
Edmund Hillary
Every spring is the only spring, a perpetual astonishment.
Ellis Peters
Explanation separates us from astonishment, which is the only gateway to the incomprehensible.
Eugene Ionesco
When you're writing, you're in a totally different zone... I can start a difficult poem and look up at the clock and see to my astonishment that three hours have passed.
Felix Dennis
My sculptures cause an uproar, astonishment, and put a smile on your face.
Florentijn Hofman
I requested the gentlemen to put on their hats, and the ladies their shawls, to avoid catching cold, and then had the windows widely opened. This proceeding caused some astonishment and alarm at first; for the Americans generally have a dread of cold air.
George Combe
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
To my astonishment, everything that I had assumed was now questioned by the findings. What started off as a search for identity that appeared to be purely Scottish in origin ended up as a discovery of my migrant roots - indeed an understanding that almost all of our families, at some stage, have been migrants - and my European roots.
Gordon Brown
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
Every time an article is written about me or any of my contemporaries who's had the fortune and discipline to look good at a certain age, I am struck by the tone of astonishment, and the certainty that something is being done secretively to beat the devil.
Joan Collins
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
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
The politics of surprise leads through the Gates of Astonishment into the Kingdom of Hope.
Max Lerner
There's nothing better than discovering, to your own astonishment, what you're meant to do. It's like falling in love.
Mike Nichols
I'm ready for a Christianity that 'ruins' my life, that captures my heart and makes me uncomfortable. I want to be filled with an astonishment which is so captivating that I am considered wild and unpredictable and... well... dangerous. Yes, I want to be 'dangerous' to a dull and boring religion.
Mike Yaconelli
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
It is a standing source of astonishment and amusement to visitors that the British Museum has so few British things in it: that it is a museum about the world as seen from Britain rather than a history focused on these islands.
Neil MacGregor
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 realise - sometimes with astonishment - how happy we had been.
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.
The knights of the theater represented to me not only the pinnacle of the profession but the esteem in which the profession was held. To find myself, to my astonishment, in that company is the grandest thing that has professionally happened to me.
Astonishment is the root of philosophy.
Egypt, the Egypt of antiquity, at a later time, exercised a mysterious fascination over me. I recognized a picture of it immediately, without hesitation and astonishment, in an illustrated magazine.
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.
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.
When you're a kid, Beethoven is Beethoven, but as I've grown older, my astonishment at the sheer inventiveness of the man has increased, and I have an appreciation that I didn't have when I was in my 20s.
I don't care that much about rote memorization. An old boyfriend of mine used to get into lacerating arguments with his parents over facts, and I used to watch on in mute astonishment. How could anyone actually argue about something that could be looked up?
I find to my mixed astonishment that I do dream, but I didn't know it.
