“I have not yet lost a feeling of wonder, and of delight, that this delicate motion should reside in all the things around us, revealing itself only to him who looks for it.”
Nobel lecture (11 December 1952) http://www.nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/physics/laureates/1952/purcell-lecture.html
Context: I have not yet lost a feeling of wonder, and of delight, that this delicate motion should reside in all the things around us, revealing itself only to him who looks for it. I remember, in the winter of our first experiments, just seven years ago, looking on snow with new eyes. There the snow lay around my doorstep — great heaps of protons quietly precessing in the earth's magnetic field. To see the world for a moment as something rich and strange is the private reward of many a discovery.
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Edward M. Purcell 3
American physicist 1912–1997Related quotes
"The Hippopotamus" http://www.cs.rice.edu/~ssiyer/minstrels/poems/848.html
“Evil resides in the very gaze which perceives Evil all around itself.”
"World of Wonders".
Conversations with Robertson Davies (1989)
Context: A sense of wonder is in itself a religious feeling. But in so many people the sense of wonder gets lost. It gets scarred over. It's as though a tortoise shell has grown over it. People reach a stage where they're never surprised, never delighted. They're never suddenly aware of glorious freedom or splendour in their lives. This is very unhappy, very unfortunate. The attitude is often self-induced. It is fear. People are afraid to be happy.
The Soul of Man Under Socialism (1891)
G.D. Birla's account of his conversation with Churchill in a letter to Gandhi (September 1935), quoted in Martin Gilbert, Prophet of Truth: Winston S. Churchill, 1922–1939 (London: Minerva, 1990), p. 619
The 1930s
