Archive

Quotes

Have you ever, looking up, seen a cloud like to a centaur, a leopard, a wolf, or a bull?

—Aristophanes, 423 BC

Bid me discourse, I will enchant thine ear.

—William Shakespeare, 1592

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

—Dai Vernon, 1994

Men willingly believe what they wish.

—Julius Caesar, c. 50 BC

Many are the wonders of the world, and none so wonderful as man.

—Sophocles, c. 441 BC

In the past, men created witches; now they create mental patients.

—Thomas Szasz, 1970

Once something becomes discernible, or understandable, we no longer need to repeat it. We can destroy it.

—Robert Wilson, 1991

A miracle entails a degree of irrationality—not because it shocks reason, but because it makes no appeal to it.

—Emmanuel Lévinas, 1952

The fact is certain because it is impossible.

—Tertullian, c. 200

One thing alone not even God can do: to make undone whatever has been done.

—Aristotle, c. 350 BC

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

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