Archive

Quotes

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

—Tom Robbins, 1976

Nothing from nothing ever yet was born.

—Lucretius, c. 58 BC

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

—Gaston Bachelard, 1960

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

—Albert Camus, 1951

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

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

—Thomas Szasz, 1970

Nothing is so easy to fake as the inner vision.

—Robertson Davies, 1985

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.

—Albert Einstein, 1930

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

God is alive. Magic is afoot.

—Leonard Cohen, 1966

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

To 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 BC

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

—Italo Calvino, 1967