Archive

Quotes

On no other stage are the scenes shifted with a swiftness so like magic as on the great stage of history when once the hour strikes.

—Edward Bellamy, 1888

Any serious attempt to do anything worthwhile is ritualistic.

—Derek Walcott, 1986

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

—Aristophanes, 423 BC

God is alive. Magic is afoot.

—Leonard Cohen, 1966

Disbelief in magic can force a poor soul into believing in government and business.

—Tom Robbins, 1976

Man is always a wizard to man, and the social world is at first magical.

—Jean-Paul Sartre, 1939

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

—Dai Vernon, 1994

The 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, 1878

Everything that deceives does so by casting a spell.

—Plato, c. 375 BC

Nothing worth knowing can be understood with the mind.

—Woody Allen, 1979

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

—Emmanuel Lévinas, 1952

I shall curse you with book and bell and candle.

—Thomas Malory, c. 1470

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

—Thomas Szasz, 1970