The Wonder Paradox Quotes

“To find your own poem to help with making decisions, look for one that mentions choices or roads. We want to reach a field of contemplation, a state of mind near daydream, a mood of thought without the stress of a demanded answer, because when we’re there we can hear more parts of ourselves.”
― Jennifer Michael Hecht, The Wonder Paradox: Awe, Poetry, and the Meaningful Life

“It’s as if we have lamps but won’t plug them in because our ancestors believed electricity was spirit-made. Having lost belief in spirits, we sit in the dark. There’s no need. We have holidays and rituals, crafted like tungsten and glass for glowing. We have poems that buzz with electric charge. Let’s plug them in.”
― Jennifer Michael Hecht, The Wonder Paradox: Awe, Poetry, and the Meaningful Life

“The wonder paradox is the miracle that we are blown away by the experiences of consciousness. Religion and art invite us to a world bigger than normal life, into contact with the weirdness of our human situation. We live within paradoxes. We feel permanent though well aware of death. The consciousness paradox is the startling fact that soft matter afloat in a bone bowl made Mozart’s sonatas, Shakespeare’s plays, and the whole astounding modern world.”
― Jennifer Michael Hecht, The Wonder Paradox: Awe, Poetry, and the Meaningful Life

“Do you have a potent way to sustain your sense of meaning, courage, peace, and awe?”
― Jennifer Michael Hecht, The Wonder Paradox: Awe, Poetry, and the Meaningful Life

“Be patient toward all that is unsolved in your heart and try to love the questions themselves, like locked rooms and like books that are now written in a very foreign tongue. Do not now seek the answers, which cannot be given you because you would not be able to live them. And the point is, to live everything. Live the questions now. Perhaps you will then gradually, without noticing it, live along some distant day into the answer. —Rainer Maria Rilke”
― Jennifer Michael Hecht, The Wonder Paradox: Awe, Poetry, and the Meaningful Life

“Wallace Stevens wrote, “After one has abandoned a belief in God, poetry is that essence which takes its place as life’s redemption.”
― Jennifer Michael Hecht, The Wonder Paradox: Awe, Poetry, and the Meaningful Life