The more enlightened our houses are, the more their walls ooze ghosts.
—Italo Calvino, 1967Quotes
A miracle entails a degree of irrationality—not because it shocks reason, but because it makes no appeal to it.
—Emmanuel Lévinas, 1952The most beautiful emotion we can experience is the mysterious. It is the fundamental emotion that stands at the cradle of all true art and science.
—Albert Einstein, 1930There 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, 1960Watch with glittering eyes the whole world around you, because the greatest secrets are always hidden in the most unlikely places. Those who don’t believe in magic will never find it.
—Roald Dahl, 1990The subconscious is ceaselessly murmuring, and it is by listening to these murmurs that one hears the truth.
—Gaston Bachelard, 1960Appearances often are deceiving.
—Aesop, c. 550 BCCurses are like young chickens, they always come home to roost.
—Robert Southey, 1809Nothing is so easy to fake as the inner vision.
—Robertson Davies, 1985In 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, 1967Nothing from nothing ever yet was born.
—Lucretius, c. 58 BCTo 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 BCFaith is to believe what you do not see; the reward of this faith is to see what you believe.
—Saint Augustine, c. 400