A Quote by Charles Darwin

Attention, if sudden and close, graduates into surprise; and this into astonishment; and this into stupefied amazement.

Charles Darwin

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Amazement Astonishment Attention Close Graduates Sudden Surprise

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Charles Darwin
English - Scientist
February 12, 1809 - April 19, 1882

You might ask yourself why you want to surprise your readers in the first place. A surprise ending is sort of like a surprise party. Probably some people, somewhere, enjoy having friends and trusted colleagues lunge at them in the sudden blinding light of their own living room, but I don't think most of us do.

Jincy Willett

The politics of surprise leads through the Gates of Astonishment into the Kingdom of Hope.

Max Lerner

Existence itself is nothing if not an amazement. Good poems restore amazement.

Jane Hirshfield

Love withers with predictability; its very essence is surprise and amazement. To make love a prisoner of the mundane is to take its passion and lose it forever.

Leo Buscaglia

Gordon Way's astonishment at being suddenly shot dead was nothing compared to his astonishment at what happened next.

Douglas Adams

That which is not slightly distorted lacks sensible appeal; from which it follows that irregularity – that is to say, the unexpected, surprise and astonishment, are a essential part and characteristic of beauty.

Charles Baudelaire

I've never had a surprise birthday party. I've had every other type of surprise. I've had surprise beatings, surprise drug tests, surprise daughter I think.

Dave Attell

Overcoming complacency is crucial at the start of any change process, and it often requires a little bit of surprise, something that grabs attention at more than an intellectual level. You need to surprise people with something that disturbs their view that everything is perfect.

John P. Kotter

A recurring dream probably merits close attention. Something wants you to pay attention.

Amy Hardie

Thus, cases of injustice, and oppression, and tyranny, and the most extravagant bigotry, are in constant occurrence among us every day. It is the custom to trumpet forth much wonder and astonishment at the chief actors therein setting at defiance so completely the opinion of the world; but there is no greater fallacy; it is precisely because they do consult the opinion of their own little world that such things take place at all, and strike the great world dumb with amazement.

Charles Dickens

A sudden bold and unexpected question doth many times surprise a man and lay him open.

Francis Bacon

I was eleven years old when I saw a woman for the first time, and I was seized by such sudden surprise that I burst into tears.

Mia Couto

Sometimes love is a surprise, an instant of recognition, a sudden gift at a sudden moment that makes everything different from then on. Some people will say that's not love, that you can't really love someone you don't know. But, I'm not so sure. Love doesn't seem to follow a plan; it's not a series of steps. It can hit with the force of nature--an earthquake, a tidal wave, a storm of wild relentless energy that is beyond your simple attempts at control.

Deb Caletti

That which intoxicates, the sensually ecstatic, the sudden surprise, the urge to be profoundly stirred at any price -- dreadful tendencies!

Friedrich Nietzsche

Frederick Buechner brings the reader to his knees, sometimes in laughter, sometimes in an astonishment very close to prayer, and at the best of times in a combination of both.

Michael Mewshaw

But nowadays everybody's a comedian, even the weather girls and continuity announcers. We laugh at everything. Not intelligently anymore, not with sudden shock, astonishment, or revelation, just relentlessly and meaninglessly. No more rain showers in the desert, just mud and drizzle everywhere, occasionally illuminated by the flash of paparazzi.

Douglas Adams

A Quote by Charles Darwin

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