A Literary Prescription for

Wonder

For waking up your sense of astonishment at a world you had stopped really looking at.

Wonder is our first language. Children have it in abundance, that open-mouthed astonishment at a beetle, a puddle, the moon. Somewhere in the business of growing up most of us mislay it, and the world goes flat and known and dull. But it is not gone, only sleeping, and awe turns out to be good for us: it quiets the anxious self and widens the heart. These books and poems are for waking wonder back up, and remembering that you live on something astonishing.

Books Poetry Quotes & Prose

Books

Prescribed reading

Some of these are by naturalists and scientists who never lost their astonishment at the living world, and some are stories that hold on to a child’s way of seeing. Non-fiction and fiction alike, they are all teachers of attention, and attention, it turns out, is where wonder begins.

The Sense of Wonder

Rachel Carson · 1965

A short, radiant book, written for a friend’s child but meant for all of us, about how to keep the sense of wonder alive through a lifetime. Carson believed awe was as necessary as food, and this small volume is her gentle argument for protecting it. Read it slowly, ideally near an open window. It will send you outside to look.

“If a child is to keep alive his inborn sense of wonder… he needs the companionship of at least one adult who can share it.”

The Soul of an Octopus

Sy Montgomery · 2015

Montgomery befriends octopuses, creatures so alien and so intelligent that knowing them rearranges your sense of what a mind can be. Her curiosity is infectious, and the book brims with the delight of discovering that the world is far stranger and richer than we assumed. A joyful, wondering read about a genuinely astonishing animal.

Pilgrim at Tinker Creek

Annie Dillard · 1974

Dillard spent a year watching one small patch of Virginia creek and wilderness, and paying such ferocious attention that the ordinary became luminous and terrible and holy. This is wonder as a spiritual discipline, fierce and unsentimental. For anyone who suspects there is more to see if they only looked harder, Dillard shows what looking harder can do.

The Little Prince

Antoine de Saint-Exupéry · 1943

A children’s book adults keep returning to, because it says, more clearly than almost anything, that the grown-up way of seeing has lost something essential. Its central line, that what is essential is invisible to the eye, is really about wonder: about looking with the heart. Gentle, strange and quietly profound at any age.

A Sand County Almanac

Aldo Leopold · 1949

Leopold’s classic of nature writing moves through a year on his Wisconsin farm with such close, loving attention that a marsh or a birch or a single goose becomes a source of astonishment. Underneath the wonder is a quiet ethic of care for the living world. A foundational book for anyone learning to look at land and see marvels.

The Hidden Life of Trees

Peter Wohlleben · 2015

Wohlleben, a forester, reveals that trees communicate, cooperate and care for one another in ways that sound almost impossible, and turn a walk in the woods into something astonishing. It is wonder grounded in real science, and it permanently changes how you see a forest. A quietly mind-expanding book about the secret life going on all around us.

Poems about wonder

For the world made new again

from “Miracles”

Walt Whitman, 1856

Why, who makes much of a miracle?
As to me I know of nothing else but miracles,
…To me every hour of the light and dark is a miracle,
Every cubic inch of space is a miracle.

Whitman refuses to save wonder for the rare and spectacular. For him the whole ordinary world, every hour, every inch of space, is a standing miracle if only we would see it. It is the perfect antidote to a flattened, taken-for-granted life: a reminder that you do not need to travel anywhere to be astonished. You are already surrounded.

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from “The Starlight Night”

Gerard Manley Hopkins, 1877

Look at the stars! look, look up at the skies!
O look at all the fire-folk sitting in the air!
The bright boroughs, the circle-citadels there!

Hopkins can barely contain himself: the poem is almost all delighted exclamation, urging us to look, look, look up. He sees the night sky not as distant physics but as a living, glittering city. Read it on a clear night and it does what it asks, it drags your eyes upward and makes the familiar stars astonishing all over again.

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from “Aurora Leigh”

Elizabeth Barrett Browning, 1856

Earth’s crammed with heaven,
And every common bush afire with God;
But only he who sees, takes off his shoes,
The rest sit round it and pluck blackberries.

Barrett Browning draws the sharpest possible line between two ways of living: the one who sees the ordinary bush ablaze with the sacred, and the one who sits beside the same bush merely gathering fruit. Wonder, she suggests, is a choice of attention, always available, mostly missed. A few lines to keep close as a reminder to take off your shoes.

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“My Heart Leaps Up”

William Wordsworth, 1807

My heart leaps up when I behold
A rainbow in the sky:
So was it when my life began;
So is it now I am a man;
…The Child is father of the Man.

Wordsworth wants to keep, into old age, the pure leap of joy a child feels at a rainbow, and fears the day it might fade. His famous line, that the child is father of the man, insists that the wondering child we once were is the truest part of us. A small vow of a poem: to stay astonished, on purpose, for life.

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Quotes & Prose

Quotes about wonder to keep

The world will never starve for want of wonders, but only for want of wonder.

G. K. Chesterton

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Wonder is the beginning of wisdom.

Socrates

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Look deep into nature, and then you will understand everything better.

Albert Einstein

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The most beautiful thing we can experience is the mysterious.

Albert Einstein

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To see a world in a grain of sand, and a heaven in a wild flower.

William Blake

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From Georgia

Widening the view

A daily practice for feeling your small life connected to something vast, and an essay on how noticing the good rekindles a sense of wonder.

A Daily Meditation for Connection

Guided meditation by Georgia Clare

A short practice for stepping out of the small, hurried self and feeling yourself part of something much larger and quietly astonishing.

Listen Now For Free

How a Gratitude Journal Changed My Life

Personal essay by Georgia Clare · The Library

On how the simple habit of noticing what is already good slowly trained my eye, and returned a sense of wonder to ordinary days.

Read the Essay →

The 21-Day Meditation Course

Guided Meditation Course · Georgia Clare

Three weeks of short, guided meditations to help you build a calm, steady daily practice, one day at a time.

Start the 21-Day Course →

Questions people ask

Reading for Wonder

Where should I start?

Start with The Sense of Wonder by Rachel Carson, a small, luminous book about keeping alive the capacity for awe, written as a kind of instruction to us all. And if you want something to widen your eyes about the living world, The Soul of an Octopus does it like little else. The poems below are a fast way in, if you only have a few minutes.

What can I read to feel more wonder in ordinary life?

Books by people who look closely. The Soul of an Octopus and Pilgrim at Tinker Creek both pay such fierce attention to the living world that you come away seeing more. Or begin with the poems and the lines to keep further down the page. Wonder is mostly a matter of noticing, and these writers are wonderful teachers of how to notice.

Which quotes about wonder are worth keeping?

Quotes worth keeping include “He who can no longer pause to wonder is as good as dead.” (Albert Einstein), “The world will never starve for want of wonders, but only for want of wonder.” (G. K. Chesterton) and “Wonder is the beginning of wisdom.” (Socrates). You will find these and more in the quotes section above.

Can reading really bring back a sense of wonder?

It genuinely can. Wonder fades not because the world runs out of marvels but because we stop looking, worn down by routine and hurry. Reading writers who have kept their eyes open, at the stars, at an octopus, at a single creek, lends you their attention for a while. You look up from the page and the ordinary world is quietly astonishing again.

Wonder

Prescribed reading

For the world made new again

Quotes about wonder to keep

Widening the view

Reading for Wonder

Where should I start?

What can I read to feel more wonder in ordinary life?

Which quotes about wonder are worth keeping?

Can reading really bring back a sense of wonder?

More prescriptions await.