Five things on being astonished:

“It is an astonishment to be alive, and it behoves you to be astonished.” — Katherine Rundell, paraphrasing poet John Donne

“If you attend thoughtfully to what you already have, you need nothing more. It’s all here.” — Claire Messud

“Let me / keep my mind on what matters, / which is my work, / which is mostly standing

quote from American Childhood (Annie Dillard):

There was joy in concentration, and the world afforded an inexhaustible wealth of projects to concentrate on. There was joy in effort, and the world resisted effort to just the right degree, and yielded to it at last. People cut Mount Rushmore into faces; they chipped here and there for years. People sl

A quote by Stephen Fry:

“Oscar Wilde said that if you know what you want to be, then you inevitably become it - that is your punishment, but if you never know, then you can be anything. There is a truth to that. We are not nouns, we are verbs. I am not a thing - an actor, a writer - I am a person who does things - I write, I act - and I never know w

To pay attention, this is our endless and proper work. - Mary Oliver

"When everything is readily available and consumable, contemplative attention is impossible." (Byung-Chal Han, Vita Contemplativa)

But no one has ever started over from scratch by devising a wholly new conceptual structure, an entirely new vessel. Why? Because we cannot step outside of our own thought. We think in terms of the conceptual structure that we happen to have. Thought changes from within, step by step, in the harsh and continuous confrontation with its object: reali