Reverence...........................

13.  Nothing is more melancholy that to compass the whole creation, 'probing into the deeps of earth', as the poet says, and peering curiously into the secrets of others' souls, without once understanding that to hold fast to the divine spirit within, and serve it loyally, is all that is needful.  Such service involves keeping it pure from passion, and from aimlessness, and from discontent with the works of gods or men;  for the former of these works deserves our reverence, for their excellence;  the latter our goodwill, for fraternity's sake, and at times perhaps our pity too, because of men's ignorance of good and evil - and infirmity as crippling as the inability to distinguish black from white.

-Marcus Aurelius,   Meditations,  Book Two

Veneration.......................

"Try and penetrate with our limited means the secrets of nature and you will find that, behind all the discernible concatenations, there remains something subtle, intangible and inexplicable. Veneration for this force beyond anything that we can comprehend is my religion. To that extent I am, in point of fact, religious."

-Albert Einstein

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Footing......................................

Two perceptions cast their shadows over my existence.  One consists in my realization that the world is inexplicably mysterious and full of suffering;  the other in the fact that I have been born into a period of spiritual decadence in mankind.  I have become familiar with and ready to deal with each, through the thinking which has led me to the ethical and affirmative position of Reverence for Life.  In that principle my life has found firm footing and a clear path to follow.

-Albert Schweitzer (1875-1965), as excerpted from Out of My Life and Thought:  An Autobiography

Reverence..............................

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Inspired............................

"Mankind was never so happily inspired as when it made a cathedral."
-Robert Louis Stevenson

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back story on Mont Saint-Michel here

The immortal power............................

"If you have a good heart you will always have some lightness of heart;  you will always have the power of enjoying special human feasts, and positive human good news.  But the heart which is there to be lightened will also be there to be hurt;  and really if you only want to be happy, to be steadily and stupidly happy like the animals, it may be well worth your while not to have a heart at all.  Fortunately, however, being happy is not so important as having a jolly time.  Philosophers are happy;  saints have a jolly time.  The important thing in life is not to keep a steady system of pleasure and composure (which can be done quite well by hardening one's heart or thickening one's head), but to keep alive in oneself the immortal power of astonishment and laughter and a kind of young reverence."
-G. K Chesterton, as excerpted from Common Sense 101:  Lessons from G. K. Chesterton

Reverence.......................

As I came home through the woods with my string of fish, trailing my pole, it being now quite dark, I caught a glimpse of a woodchuck stealing across my path, and felt a strange thrill of savage delight, and was strongly tempted to seize and devour him raw; not that I was hungry then, except for that wildness which he represented. Once or twice, however, while I lived at the pond, I found myself ranging the woods, like a half-starved hound, with a strange abandonment, seeking some kind of venison which I might devour, and no morsel could have been too savage for me. The wildest scenes had become unaccountably familiar. I found in myself, and still find, an instinct toward a higher, or, as it is named, spiritual life, as do most men, and another toward a primitive rank and savage one, and I reverence them both. I love the wild not less than the good. 
-Henry David Thoreau,  Walden

Affection.........................

"When we reverence anything in the mature, it is their virtues or their wisdom, and this is an easy matter. But we reverence the faults and follies of children.  We should probably come considerably nearer to the true conception of things if we treated all grown-up persons, of all titles and types, with precisely that dark affection and dazed respect with which we treat the infantile limitations."
-G. K. Chesterton

Reverence................

 
 40.  All is well with a tool, instrument, or utensil when it serves the use for which it was made, though in this case its maker is not present.  But with things formed by Nature, the power that fashioned them is still within them, and remains in them.  All the more, then, should you have it in reverence, and be assured that if only you live and act according to its will, you have all things to your liking.  That is the way in which the universe, too, has all things to its liking.

Marcus Aurelius,  Meditations
Book Six