Awe Quotes

“Wonder, the mental state of openness, questioning, curiosity, and embracing mystery, arises out of experiences of awe. In our studies, people who find more everyday awe show evidence of living with wonder. They are more open to new ideas. To what is unknown. To what language can’t describe. To the absurd. To seeking new knowledge. To experience itself, for example of sound, or color, or bodily sensation, or the directions thought might take during dreams or meditation. To the strengths and virtues of other people. It should not surprise that people who feel even five minutes a day of everyday awe are more curious about art, music, poetry, new scientific discoveries, philosophy, and questions about life and death. They feel more comfortable with mysteries, with that which cannot be explained.”
― Dacher Keltner, Awe: The New Science of Everyday Wonder and How It Can Transform Your Life

“We can find awe, then, in eight wonders of life: moral beauty, collective effervescence, nature, music, visual design, spirituality and religion, life and death, and epiphany.”
― Dacher Keltner, Awe: The New Science of Everyday Wonder and How It Can Transform Your Life

“Awe is the feeling of being in the presence of something vast that transcends your current understanding of the world.”
― Dacher Keltner, Awe: The New Science of Everyday Wonder and How It Can Transform Your Life

“Tap into your childlike sense of wonder. Young children are in an almost constant state of awe since everything is so new to them. During your walk, try to approach what you see with fresh eyes, imagining that you’re seeing it for the first time. Take a moment in each walk to take in the vastness of things, for example in looking at a panoramic view or up close at the detail of a leaf or flower. Go somewhere new. Each week, try to choose a new location. You’re more likely to feel awe in a novel environment where the sights and sounds are unexpected and unfamiliar to you. That said, some places never seem to get old, so there’s nothing wrong with revisiting your favorite spots if you find that they consistently fill you with awe. The key is to recognize new features of the same old place.”
― Dacher Keltner, Awe: The New Science of Everyday Wonder and How It Can Transform Your Life

“Awe empowers sacrifice, and inspires us to give that most precious of resources, time. Memphis University professor Jia Wei Zhang and I brought people to a lab where they were surrounded by either awe-inspiring plants or less-inspiring ones. As participants were leaving the lab, we asked if they would fold origami cranes to be sent to victims of the 2011 tsunami in Japan. Being surrounded with awe-inspiring plants led people to volunteer more time. The last pillar of the default self—striving for competitive advantage, registered in a stinginess toward giving away possessions and time—crumbles during awe. Awe awakens the better angels of our nature.”
― Dacher Keltner, Awe: The New Science of Everyday Wonder and How It Can Transform Your Life

“the default self. This self, one of many that makes up who you are, is focused on how you are distinct from others, independent, in control, and oriented toward competitive advantage. It has been amplified by the rise of individualism and materialism, and no doubt was less prominent during other time periods (e.g., in Indigenous cultures thousands of years ago). Today, this default self keeps you on track in achieving your goals and urges you to rise in the ranks in the world, all essential to your survival and thriving. When our default self reigns too strongly, though, and we are too focused on ourselves, anxiety, rumination, depression, and self-criticism can overtake us. An overactive default self can undermine the collaborative efforts and goodwill of our communities. Many of today’s social ills arise out of an overactive default self, augmented by self-obsessed digital technologies. Awe, it would seem, quiets this urgent voice of the default self.”
― Dacher Keltner, Awe: The New Science of Everyday Wonder and How It Can Transform Your Life

“Tears, then, arise when we perceive vast things that unite us into community.”
― Dacher Keltner, Awe: The New Science of Everyday Wonder and How It Can Transform Your Life

“Simply being in a context of awe leads to a “small self.” We can quiet that nagging voice of the interfering neurotic simply by locating ourselves in contexts of more awe.”
― Dacher Keltner, Awe: The New Science of Everyday Wonder and How It Can Transform Your Life

“Fun, like awe, is one of several self-transcendent states, a space of emotions that transport us out of our self-focused, threat-oriented, and status quo mindset to a realm where we connect to something larger than the self. Joy, the feeling of being free, for the moment, of worldly concerns, is part of this space, as is ecstasy (or bliss), when we sense ourself to dissolve completely (in awe we remain aware, although faintly, of our selves). And fun, the mirth and lighthearted delight we feel when imagining alternative perspectives upon our mundane lives we so often take too seriously.”
― Dacher Keltner, Awe: The New Science of Everyday Wonder and How It Can Transform Your Life

“Sometimes the most important finding in a scientific study is a simple observation, free of any hypothesis or pitting of theoretical perspectives against one another. And this was true in our daily diary research: people experience awe two to three times a week. That’s once every couple of days. They did so in finding the extraordinary in the ordinary: a friend’s generosity to a homeless person in the streets; the scent of a flower; looking at a leafy tree’s play of light and shadow on a sidewalk; hearing a song that transported them back to a first love; bingeing Game of Thrones with friends. Everyday awe.”
― Dacher Keltner, Awe: The New Science of Everyday Wonder and How It Can Transform Your Life

“Music offered up a fourth wonder of life, transporting people to new dimensions of symbolic meaning in experiences at concerts, listening quietly to a piece of music, chanting in a religious ceremony, or simply singing with others.”
― Dacher Keltner, Awe: The New Science of Everyday Wonder and How It Can Transform Your Life

“What most commonly led people around the world to feel awe? Nature? Spiritual practice? Listening to music? In fact, it was other people’s courage, kindness, strength, or overcoming.”
― Dacher Keltner, Awe: The New Science of Everyday Wonder and How It Can Transform Your Life

“Awe is about our relation to the vast mysteries of life.”
― Dacher Keltner, Awe: The New Science of Everyday Wonder and How It Can Transform Your Life

“When our default self reigns too strongly”
― Dacher Keltner, Awe: The New Science of Everyday Wonder and How It Can Transform Your Life

“Awe can make us feel that our life’s work is both less important than our default self makes it out to be and yet promising in purpose and possibility. Teens’ and veterans’ reports of feeling awe during the middle of the trip, rather than pride or joy, accounted for why they felt less stressed, more socially connected, more loving toward their families, and happier one week later.”
― Dacher Keltner, Awe: The New Science of Everyday Wonder and How It Can Transform Your Life

“Prior to the rafting trip and one week after, I and my collaborators at UC Berkeley, Craig Anderson and Maria Monroy, gathered measures of stress, well-being, and post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD), the latter based on reports of sleep disruption, intrusive memories, flashbacks, and feeling on edge. Before and after the rafting trip, participants spat into little vials so that we could assay changes in stress-related cortisol over the course of the excursion. We mounted GoPros on the fronts of the rafts, allowing us to film, up close, coordinated rowing, synchronized hoots and hollers, collective laughter, oar touching and celebratory calls after navigating dangerous rapids, shrieks of fear, and vocal bursts of awe—wow, oooooh, aah, whoa. After lunch on the day of the rafting trip, we asked our teenagers and veterans to write about their experiences on the river, to tell their stories of wild awe. As”
― Dacher Keltner, Awe: The New Science of Everyday Wonder and How It Can Transform Your Life

“We had two groups of participants. The first included students from underresourced high schools in Oakland and Richmond, California, schools lacking the green spaces and organic gardens often present in private schools and well-to-do suburban public schools. Many of the teens had never been camping. Growing up in poverty, like these teens did, leads to elevated stress, a greater likelihood of anxiety and depression, and chronic inflammation. Veterans comprised our other group. Veterans can show the same trauma-shaped stress profile as kids raised in poverty: disrupted sleep, intrusive thoughts, difficulties concentrating, and the vigilant sense that peril hovers nearby.”
― Dacher Keltner, Awe: The New Science of Everyday Wonder and How It Can Transform Your Life

“In fact, it is hard to imagine a single thing you can do that is better for your body and mind than finding awe outdoors. Doing so leads to the reduced likelihood of cardiovascular disease, respiratory disease, diabetes, depression, anxiety, and cancer.”
― Dacher Keltner, Awe: The New Science of Everyday Wonder and How It Can Transform Your Life

“And as with any biological need, when our need for wild awe is satisfied, we fare better, and when it is thwarted, we suffer in mind and body.”
― Dacher Keltner, Awe: The New Science of Everyday Wonder and How It Can Transform Your Life

“Rousseau’s epiphany was that in our natural state, we are endowed with passions that guide us to truth, equality, justice, and the reduction of suffering—our moral compass. We sense these intuitions in music, art, and, above all, being in nature. It is institutions like the church and formal education that disconnect us from our nobler tendencies. In that experience outdoors in the hills outside of Paris, Romanticism was born.”
― Dacher Keltner, Awe: The New Science of Everyday Wonder and How It Can Transform Your Life

“GET OUTDOORS.”
― Dacher Keltner, Awe: The New Science of Everyday Wonder and How It Can Transform Your Life

“We can do whatever we want on this planet, I remember thinking, but the world will always win—so we might as well build as much joy, real joy for all people while we’re here.”
― Dacher Keltner, Awe: The New Science of Everyday Wonder and How It Can Transform Your Life

“Awe, by contrast, heightens our awareness of being part of a community, of feeling embraced and supported by others. Feeling awe, we place the stresses of life within larger contexts. Perhaps everyday awe, we wondered, would be associated with lower inflammation.”
― Dacher Keltner, Awe: The New Science of Everyday Wonder and How It Can Transform Your Life

“Because starting in our midfifties, until about the age of seventy-five, people get happier. As we get older, we realize that what matters most in life is not money, status, title, or success, but meaningful social connections. At age seventy-five, though, things change. We become increasingly aware of our own mortality, and we see people we love die. After seventy-five, happiness drops a bit and depression and anxiety rise. It’s a great age to test the powers of the awe walk.”
― Dacher Keltner, Awe: The New Science of Everyday Wonder and How It Can Transform Your Life

“Our daily diary findings suggest that these great minds and cultures were onto something: the wonders of life are so often nearby.”
― Dacher Keltner, Awe: The New Science of Everyday Wonder and How It Can Transform Your Life

“And this was true in our daily diary research: people experience awe two to three times a week. That’s once every couple of days.”
― Dacher Keltner, Awe: The New Science of Everyday Wonder and How It Can Transform Your Life

“In our daily lives, we most frequently feel awe in encounters with moral beauty, and secondarily in nature and in experiences with music, art, and film. Rarer were everyday awe experiences of the spiritual variety (although had we done the study at a religious college, this no doubt would have been different). We also confirmed, as in our mapping studies, that most moments of awe—about three-quarters—feel good, and only one-quarter are flavored with threat. Culture”
― Dacher Keltner, Awe: The New Science of Everyday Wonder and How It Can Transform Your Life

“Awe feels intrinsically good. Our experiences of awe, though, clearly differ from feelings of beauty.”
― Dacher Keltner, Awe: The New Science of Everyday Wonder and How It Can Transform Your Life

“A second wonder of life is collective effervescence, a term introduced by French sociologist Émile Durkheim in his analysis of the emotional core of religion. His phrase speaks to the qualities of such experiences: we feel like we are buzzing and crackling with some life force that merges people into a collective self, a tribe, an oceanic “we.”
― Dacher Keltner, Awe: The New Science of Everyday Wonder and How It Can Transform Your Life

“Awe occurs in a realm separate from the mundane world of materialism, money, acquisition, and status signaling—a realm beyond the profane that many call the sacred.”
― Dacher Keltner, Awe: The New Science of Everyday Wonder and How It Can Transform Your Life