Archive

Quotes

To blow and to swallow at the same time is not easy; I cannot at the same time be here and also there.

—Plautus, c. 200 BC

All things are filled full of signs, and it is a wise man who can learn about one thing from another.

—Plotinus, c. 255

Bid me discourse, I will enchant thine ear.

—William Shakespeare, 1592

Curses are like young chickens, they always come home to roost.

—Robert Southey, 1809

God is alive. Magic is afoot.

—Leonard Cohen, 1966

Nothing worth knowing can be understood with the mind.

—Woody Allen, 1979

There is not so contemptible a plant or animal that does not confound the most enlarged understanding.

—John Locke, 1689

The mind is led on, step by step, to defeat its own logic.

—Dai Vernon, 1994

There 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, 1960

To ensure the adoration of a theorem for any length of time, faith is not enough; a police force is needed as well.

—Albert Camus, 1951

Nothing is so easy to fake as the inner vision.

—Robertson Davies, 1985

In 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, 1967

Appearances often are deceiving.

—Aesop, c. 550 BC