“Our brains are no longer conditioned for reverence and awe.”
Source: Self-Consciousness : Memoirs (1989), Ch. 6
Context: Our brains are no longer conditioned for reverence and awe. We cannot imagine a Second Coming that would not be cut down to size by the televised evening news, or a Last Judgment not subject to pages of holier-than-Thou second-guessing in The New York Review of Books.
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John Updike 240
American novelist, poet, short story writer, art critic, an… 1932–2009Related quotes
1820s, Signs of the Times (1829)
Ludwig Feuerbach and the End of Classical German Philosophy http://marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1886/ludwig-feuerbach/ch04.htm (1886)
Attributed to Milton at http://quotationsbook.com/quote/31964/#sthash.zAJjMqmY.dpbs, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reverence_(emotion)#Quotations, great-quotes.com, and brainyquote.com.
Spirituality author Sarah Ban Breathnach writes, in her 1996 Simple Abundance Journal of Gratitude: "Gratitude bestows reverence, allowing us to encounter everyday epiphanies, those transcendent moments of awe that change forever how we experience life (is it abundant or is it lacking?) and the world (is it friendly or is it hostile?)." A Milton quotation occurs on the same page.
Misattributed
Source: Who Is Man? (1965), Ch. 5<!-- The sense of the ineffable, p. 89 -->
Context: Faith is not belief, an assent to a proposition, faith is attachment to the meaning beyond the mystery.
Knowledge is fostered by curiosity; wisdom is fostered by awe. Awe precedes faith; it is the root of faith. We must be guided by awe to be worthy of faith.
Forfeit your sense of awe, let your conceit diminish your ability to revere, and the world becomes a market place for you. The loss of awe is the avoidance of insight. A return to reverence is the first prerequisite for a revival of wisdom, for the discovery of the world as an allusion to God.
“Some people without brains do an awful lot of talking, don't you think?”
Source: The Wonderful Wizard of Oz
Source: The Wonderful Wizard of Oz
The Reinvention of Work (New York: Harper, 1994), p. 128.