Lapham’s Quarterly

Nothing is so easy to fake as the inner vision.

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.

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

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.

To ensure the adoration of a theorem for any length of time, faith is not enough; a police force is needed as well.

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

Nothing worth knowing can be understood with the mind.

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

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

Nothing from nothing ever yet was born.

To blow and to swallow at the same time is not easy; I cannot at the same time be here and also there.

Faith is to believe what you do not see; the reward of this faith is to see what you believe.

God is alive. Magic is afoot.

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

There are times when reality becomes too complex for oral communication. But legend gives it a form by which it pervades the whole world.

Men willingly believe what they wish.

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

Bid me discourse, I will enchant thine ear.

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.

Nothing is so easy as to deceive one’s self; for what we wish, that we readily believe.

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

Superstitions are habits rather than beliefs.

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.

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

Any serious attempt to do anything worthwhile is ritualistic.

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.

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

I shall curse you with book and bell and candle.

All things are filled full of signs, and it is a wise man who can learn about one thing from another.

The fear of the Lord is true wisdom, and he who hath it not can in no way penetrate the true secrets of magic.

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

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

Egypt was the mother of magicians.

The 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.

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

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.

Appearances often are deceiving.

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

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

Everything that deceives does so by casting a spell.

The fact is certain because it is impossible.