Have you ever, looking up, seen a cloud like to a centaur, a leopard, a wolf, or a bull?
—Aristophanes, 423 BCQuotes
In the past, men created witches; now they create mental patients.
—Thomas Szasz, 1970The mind is led on, step by step, to defeat its own logic.
—Dai Vernon, 1994A miracle entails a degree of irrationality—not because it shocks reason, but because it makes no appeal to it.
—Emmanuel Lévinas, 1952Superstitions are habits rather than beliefs.
—Marlene Dietrich, 1962There is not so contemptible a plant or animal that does not confound the most enlarged understanding.
—John Locke, 1689Any serious attempt to do anything worthwhile is ritualistic.
—Derek Walcott, 1986Nothing is so easy as to deceive one’s self; for what we wish, that we readily believe.
—Demosthenes, 349 BCThere is nothing that man fears more than the touch of the unknown. He wants to see what is reaching toward him and to be able to recognize or at least classify it. Man always tends to avoid physical contact with anything strange.
—Elias Canetti, 1960In the society of men, the truth resides now less in what things are than in what they are not. Our social realities are so ugly if seen in the light of exiled truth, and beauty is almost no longer possible if it is not a lie.
—R.D. Laing, 1967The fear of the Lord is true wisdom, and he who hath it not can in no way penetrate the true secrets of magic.
—Abraham the Jew, c. 1400Everything is a miracle. It is a miracle that one does not dissolve in one’s bath like a lump of sugar.
—Pablo Picasso, 1929Bid me discourse, I will enchant thine ear.
—William Shakespeare, 1592