Marvels Quotes

“Fantasy, abandoned by reason, produces impossible monsters; united with it, she is the mother of the arts and the origin of marvels.”
― Francisco de Goya

“In the great glasshouses streaming with condensation, the children in mourning-dress beheld marvels.”
― Arthur Rimbaud

“During an especially noisy elementary school assembly I witnessed a common marvel.  Someone spoke,"Once upon a time..." into the mic, and the room hushed.  Such magic never ceases to amaze me.”
― Richelle E. Goodrich, Smile Anyway: Quotes, Verse, & Grumblings for Every Day of the Year

“Your mind, your motion and your expression is an animation to marvel and to praise.”
― Bryant McGill, Simple Reminders: Inspiration for Living Your Best Life

“I found it impossible to tear myself away from my station and plunge into Hungary. I feel the same disability now; a momentary reluctance to lay hands on this particular fragment of the future; not out of fear, but because, within arm's reach and still intact, this future seemed, and still seems, so full of promised marvels.”
― Patrick Leigh Fermor, A Time of Gifts

“For all the splendor of their monuments, the builders have vanished.”
― Cait Stevenson, How to Slay a Dragon: A Fantasy Hero's Guide to the Real Middle Ages

“God did not mean us to be ignorant. He left us this marvelous universe to decipher and understand.”
― James Targett, The Immersion Book of Steampunk

“Losing maturity in one’s fiction for the sake of marvels and monsters can also mean losing propriety, and that’s not always a bad thing.”
― Hal Duncan, Rhapsody: Notes on Strange Fictions

“Marvel comes quickly, cloaked in the mundane. It's the woman waking to the smell of smoke as fire spreads, miles away, through her brother's house. It's the sharp flash of recognition as a young man glimpses, in the ordinary hubbub, the stranger with whom he will share his life. It's a mother's dream of her baby, blue in the cold store, six months before he comes, stillborn, into the world.

Even the Church Fathers admitted the category of marvelous- or mirabilis, as they knew it. For them it was an irksome classification. A grey area.

Compare the marvel with it's less troublesome metaphysical kin. In the thirteenth century, the miracle reflected the steady-handed authorship of the divine- truth made manifest. Similarly magic, or magicus, demonstrated with tell-tale showmanship the desperate guile of the devil. The marvel, however, was of poor performance and tended, therefore, towards ambiguity. It took shape in the merely mortal sphere. It seemed to lack the requisite supernatural chutzpah. Here, the clergy were typically surplus to requirements.

Yet, if less outwardly compelling, the marvel was also less easily contained than either the miraculous or the magical. It remained more elusive. More stubborn. And if finally reducible in time, with the erosions of memory, to rationalization, anecdote, drinking tale or woman's lore, the marvel also rarely failed to leave behind a certain residual uncertainty. A discomfiting sense of possibility. Or, on bolder occasions, an appetite for wonder.”
― Alison MacLeod, Wave Theory of Angels

“Science can explain the basics, but it can't explain the marvels.”
― Anthony T. Hincks

“While it is never safe to affirm that the future of Physical Science has no marvels in store even more astonishing than those of the past, it seems probable that most of the grand underlying principles have been firmly established and that further advances are to be sought chiefly in the rigorous application of these principles to all the phenomena which come under our notice.”
― Robert S. Mulliken

“And yet, even the people who built the greatest marvels in the world could vanish without a trace. Those who dared to create monuments meant to last forever had still crumbled to dust. And in their silence, the pyramids proclaimed “You will crumble, too.”
― Cait Stevenson, How to Slay a Dragon: A Fantasy Hero's Guide to the Real Middle Ages

“She had thought: why suddenly does happiness descend, out of nowhere, like an archangel, out of a day that on the face of it is like any other? How can it be that life is quite unexceptional, and then all of a sudden it is not: it becomes a marvel?”
― Penelope Lively, Perfect Happiness

“We live in a world of such marvels. We should wake up in the morning and as we put on our trousers, we should remember the seahorse, and we should scream with awe and not stop screaming until we fall asleep, and the same the next day, and the next. Each single seahorse contains enough wonder to knock the whole of humanity off its feet, if we would but pay attention.”
― Katherine Rundell, Vanishing Treasures: A Bestiary of Extraordinary Endangered Creatures

“The Falcon? He ain't no hero -- Not up here!
Yeah! His skin be black -- -- but inside, he just another white guy!”
― Kurt Busiek, Marvels (1994) #4

“They weren't here to win the approval of the petty and the small-minded. They were here to save the innocent.”
― Kurt Busiek, Marvels (1994) #4