Archive

Quotes

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

—Dai Vernon, 1994

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

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

—John Locke, 1689

The Mughal’s nature is such that they demand miracles, but if a miracle were to be performed by some upright follower of our religion, they would say that it had been brought about by magic and sorcery. They would strike him down with spears or would stone him to death.

—Fr. Antonio Monserrate, 1590

Everything is a miracle. It is a miracle that one does not dissolve in one’s bath like a lump of sugar.

—Pablo Picasso, 1929

Watch 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, 1990

The subconscious is ceaselessly murmuring, and it is by listening to these murmurs that one hears the truth.

—Gaston Bachelard, 1960

Everything that deceives does so by casting a spell.

—Plato, c. 375 BC

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

—Robert Southey, 1809

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

The more enlightened our houses are, the more their walls ooze ghosts.

—Italo Calvino, 1967

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

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

—Aristotle, c. 350 BC