Surprise

Famous quotes containing the word surprise:

    Our books are false by being fragmentary: their sentences are bon mots, and not parts of natural discourse; childish expressions of surprise or pleasure in nature; or, worse, owing a brief notoriety to their petulance, or aversion from the order of nature,—being some curiosity or oddity, designedly not in harmony with nature, and purposely framed to excite surprise, as jugglers do by concealing their means.
    Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)

    A sentimental aphorism is even more a surprise than a hard- boiled sonnet.
    Mason Cooley (b. 1927)

    Adults who still derive childlike pleasure from hanging gifts of a ready-made education on the Christmas tree of a child waiting outside the door to life do not realize how unreceptive they are making the children to everything that constitutes the true surprise of life.
    Karl Kraus (1874–1936)