Sermon quotes on Awe
Thomas Aquinas
Because philosophy arises from awe, a philosopher is bound in his way to be a lover of myths and poetic fables. Poets and philosophers are alike in being big with wonder.
Neil Armstrong
Mystery creates wonder and wonder is the basis of man’s desire to understand.
Magnificent Desolation: Walking on the Moon 3D”, Documentary
Neil Armstrong
It suddenly struck me that that tiny pea, pretty and blue, was the Earth. I put up my thumb and shut one eye, and my thumb blotted out the planet Earth. I didn’t feel like a giant. I felt very, very small.
Augustine of Hippo
My mind withdrew its thoughts from experience, extracting itself from the contradictory throng of sensuous images, that it might find out what that light was wherein it was bathed… And thus, with the flash of one hurried glance, it attained to the vision of That Which Is.
Wendell Berry
It is only on the condition of humility and reverence before the world that our species will be able to remain in it.
Sarah Ban Breathnach
Gratitude bestows reverence, allowing us to encounter
everyday epiphanies, those transcendent moments of awe that
change forever how we experience life and the world.
John Calvin
There is not one little blade of grass, there is no color in this world that is not intended to make men rejoice.
Sermon No. 10 on 1 Corinthians, quoted in William J. Bouwsma, John Calvin: A Sixteenth-Century Portrait (New York: Oxford University Press, 1988), 134–35.
John Calvin
[There is nothing worse than to be] devoid of awe.
McNeill, Calvin: Institutes, 3.20.5., 854.
Oswald Chambers
You will never cease to be the most amazed person on earth at what God has done for you on the inside.
My Utmost for His Highest, Deluxe Christian Classics, Barbour, 2000, 59.
G.K. Chesterton
In nothing is the child so righteously childlike, in nothing does he exhibit more accurately the sounder order of simplicity, than in the fact that he sees everything with a simple pleasure, even the complex things.… To the child the tree and the lamppost are as natural and as artificial as each other; or rather, neither of them are natural but both supernatural. For both are splendid and unexplained. The flower with which God crowns the one, and the flame with which Sam the lamplighter crowns the other, are equally of the gold of fairytales.
G.K. Chesterton
The world will never starve for want of wonders; but only for want of wonder.
G.K. Chesterton
I would maintain that thanks are the highest form of thought; and that gratitude is happiness doubled by wonder.
A Short History of England, John Lane Company.
Edmund Clowney
God does not merely speak…he is present. Prayer is steeped in the awareness, often an awe-filled awareness, of the presence of God.
A Biblical Theology of Prayer.
Annie Dillard
Does anyone have the foggiest idea what sort of power we so blithely invoke?
Fyodor Dostoyevsky
The one essential condition of human existence is that man should always be able to bow down before something infinitely great. If men are deprived of the infinitely great they will not go on living and die of despair. The Infinite and the Eternal are as essential for man as the little planet on which he dwells.
Albert Einstein
He . . . who can no longer pause to wonder and stand rapt in awe, is as good as dead; his eyes are closed.
Living Philosophies, Simon and Schuster, 1931.
Kenneth Grahame
“Rat,” he found breath to whisper, shaking. “Are you afraid?” “Afraid?” murmured the Rat, his eyes shining with unutterable love. “Afraid! Of Him? O, never, never! And yet—and yet—O, Mole, I am afraid!”
The Wind in the Willows, chapter 7, “The Piper at the Gates of Dawn.”
Abraham Heschel
Awe is more than an emotion; it is a way of understanding, insight into a meaning greater than ourselves. The beginning of awe is wonder, and the beginning of wisdom is awe.
Who Is Man?, 1965.
Abraham J. Heschel
The surest way to suppress our ability to understand the meaning of God and the importance of worship is to take things for granted. Indifference to the divine wonder of living is the root of sin.
Immanuel Kant
Two things fill the mind with ever-increasing wonder and awe, the more often and the more intensely the mind of thought is drawn to them: the starry heavens above me and the moral law within me.”
Critique of Practical Reason
Timothy Keller
We must know the awe of praising his glory, the intimacy of finding his grace, and the struggle of asking his help, all of which can lead us to know the spiritual reality of his presence. Prayer, then, is both awe and intimacy, struggle and reality. These will not happen every time we pray, but each should be a major component of our prayer over the course of our lives.
Prayer, Penguin Publishing Group, 2014, p.5.
Timothy Keller
In the original language, ‘Fear the Lord’ doesn’t mean be afraid. It means sustaining a joyful, astonished awe, and wonder before Him.
Brennan Manning
Creation discloses a power that baffles our minds and beggars our speech.
John Milton
Gratitude bestows reverence, allowing us to encounter everyday epiphanies, those transcendent moments of awe that change forever how we experience life and the world.
John Newton
God works powerfully, but for the most part gently and gradually.
A.W. Pink
Happy the soul that has been awed by a view of God’s majesty
John Piper
The world aches to be awed. That ache was made for God. The world seeks it mainly through movies.
Twitter.com, April, 2017
Marcel Proust
The real voyage of discovery consists of not in seeking new landscapes but in having new eyes.
Bernice Johnson Reagon
If every moment is sacred and if you are amazed and in awe most of the time when you find yourself breathing and not crazy, then you are in a state of constant thankfulness, worship and humility.
“The Songs Are Free,” interview by Bill Moyers, PBS, 1991, transcript excerpt published online November 23, 2007.
A.W. Tozer
God dwells in His creation and is everywhere indivisibly present in all His works.
A.W. Tozer
The gravest question before the Church is always God Himself … the most revealing thing abt the Church is her idea of God … the mightiest thought the mind can entertain is the thought of God … Our real idea of God may lie buried under the rubbish of conventional religious notions
Paul David Tripp
Horizontal awe is meant to do one thing: stimulate vertical awe.
Taken from Awe: Why it Matters to Everything We Think, Say, and Do by Paul David Tripp, © 2015, p.21 Used by permission of Crossway, a publishing ministry of Good News Publishers, Wheaton, IL 60187, www.crossway.org.
Paul David Tripp
Every awesome thing in creation is designed to point you to the One who alone is worthy of capturing and controlling the awe of your searching and hungry heart.
Taken from Awe: Why it Matters to Everything We Think, Say, and Do by Paul David Tripp, © 2015, pp.21. Used by permission of Crossway, a publishing ministry of Good News Publishers, Wheaton, IL 60187, www.crossway.org.
Ann Voskamp
Awe ignites joy because it makes us bend the knee.
One Thousand Gifts: A Dare to Live Fully Right Where You Are.
John Wesley
Bring me a worm that can comprehend a man…I will show you a man that can comprehend the Triune God.
William Butler Yeats
The world is full of magic things, patiently waiting for our senses to grow sharper.
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