Bid me discourse, I will enchant thine ear.
—William Shakespeare, 1592Quotes
Everything is a miracle. It is a miracle that one does not dissolve in one’s bath like a lump of sugar.
—Pablo Picasso, 1929The subconscious is ceaselessly murmuring, and it is by listening to these murmurs that one hears the truth.
—Gaston Bachelard, 1960Have you ever, looking up, seen a cloud like to a centaur, a leopard, a wolf, or a bull?
—Aristophanes, 423 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, 1960Nothing worth knowing can be understood with the mind.
—Woody Allen, 1979Everything that deceives does so by casting a spell.
—Plato, c. 375 BCThe believer in magic and miracles reflects on how to impose a law on nature—and, in brief, the religious cult is the outcome of this reflection.
—Friedrich Nietzsche, 1878There is not so contemptible a plant or animal that does not confound the most enlarged understanding.
—John Locke, 1689Man is always a wizard to man, and the social world is at first magical.
—Jean-Paul Sartre, 1939Faith is to believe what you do not see; the reward of this faith is to see what you believe.
—Saint Augustine, c. 400The more enlightened our houses are, the more their walls ooze ghosts.
—Italo Calvino, 1967All things are filled full of signs, and it is a wise man who can learn about one thing from another.
—Plotinus, c. 255