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“You can't expect anyone to trust revelation if he hasn't experienced it himself. Those who haven't only know reason. And since revelation is a thing apart, and cannot be accounted for reasonably, they never will believe you. This is the great division of the world and always has been. When reason and revelation run together, why, then you have something great, a great age.”
― Mark Helprin, Winter's Tale

“Rigel, Betelgeuse, and Orion. There was no finer church, no finer choir, than the stars speaking in silence to the many consumptives silently condemned, a legion upon the dark rooftops. The wind came down from the north like a runner in lacrosse, violent and hard, to batter every living thing. They were there, each one alone in conversation with the stars, mining ephemeral love from cold and distant light.”
― Mark Helprin, Winter's Tale

“As we passed under a streetlamp I noticed, beside my own bobbing shadow, another great, leaping grotesquerie that had an uncanny suggestion of the frog world about it . . . judging from the shadow, it was soaring higher and more gaily than myself.
'Very well,' you will say, 'Why didn’t you turn around. That would be the scientific thing to do.'
But let me tell you it is not done â€� not on an empty road at midnight.”
― Loren Eiseley, The Star Thrower

“Whiteness of moonlight builds a house that is not there”
― Kathleen Raine

“If our shallow, self-critical culture sometimes seems to lack a sense of the numinous or spiritual it's only in the same way a fish lacks a sense of the ocean.”
― Grant Morrison, Supergods: What Masked Vigilantes, Miraculous Mutants, and a Sun God from Smallville Can Teach Us About Being Human

“The human species â€� mammalian primates though undoubtedly (s)he is, and made out of the dust of exploded suns - does have the need for the transcendent, the numinous, even the ecstatic. I wouldn’t trust anyone who hadn’t had this. This has to do with landscape, light, music, love and an awareness of the transience of all things, and the melancholy that invests all this. So it isn’t just gaping happily at the sunset while listening to music, and doing that while knowing that it can’t last very long. But there is no need for the supernatural in this at all. There is no dimension of the supernatural of which this gives one a share.”
― Christopher Hitchens

“It is not so much the things we know that terrify us as it is the things we do not know, the things that break all known laws and rules, the things that come upon us unaware and shatter the pleasant dream of our little world.”
― Donald Wandrei, Colossus: The collected science fiction of Donald Wandrei

“Rat!' he found breath to whisper, shaking. `Are you afraid?'

`Afraid?' murmured the Rat, his eyes shining with unutterable love. `Afraid! Of him? O, never, never! And yet--and yet-- O, Mole, I am afraid!”
― Kenneth Grahame, The Wind in the Willows

“Within our awe we only know that all we own we owe.”
― Abraham Joshua Heschel, Thunder in the Soul: To Be Known By God

“But the recurrent ambiguity of the American tale of the supernatural reveals both a fascination with the possibility of numinous experience and a perplexity about whether there was, in fact, anything numinous to be experienced. Writers often delighted in leading readers into, but not out of, the haunted dusk of the borderland.”
― Howard Kerr, The Haunted dusk: American supernatural fiction, 1820-1920

“If you are looking for numinouness, go where there are no people, because numinousness leaves places where people are!”
― Mehmet Murat ildan

“The world is sacred, of course, it is full of gods, numina, great powers and presences. We give some of them names â€� Mars of the fields and the war; Vesta the fire; Ceres the grain; Mother Tellus the earth; the Penates of the storehouse. The rivers, the springs. And in the stormcloud and the light is the great power called the father god. But they aren’t people. They don’t love and hate, they aren’t for or against. They accept the worship due them, which augments their power, through which we live.”
― Ursula K. Le Guin

“I looked at the groups forming and breaking up, at the couples lost in each other’s eyes, at the tentative first conversations, at the loners standing at the bar or sitting at little tables, at the hubbub and hullabaloo of desire and fulfilment, of cruising and conversing, of courtship and companionship. I listened to the hum and drone of conversation, the clinking of glasses, the jangle of the slot machine, the odd burst of hilarity or profanity. I smelt the fug of spilt beer and fresh sweat and stale aftershave. And I thought, all we mortals can do, in the end, in the absence of the numinous, is to settle for one another.”
― Michiel Heyns, I am Pandarus

“I would like to say that the following days were filled with awe and excitement, with marvels and wonders, astonishing discoveries. If they were, the marvels went unrecognized.
Mysteries we did find, and they were many. But I learned that something can be too mysterious, too alien - so mysterious or alien as to approach being meaningless:
-two connected rooms crisscrossed by metal rods; we had to laboriously climb through them each time we went in or out of the ship until we found a curving passage that bypassed them. We couldn't even guess at the purpose or function of the rooms or the rods.”
― Richard Paul Russo, Ship of Fools