Archive

Quotes

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

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

—Emmanuel Lévinas, 1952

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

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

—John Locke, 1689

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

—Thomas Szasz, 1970

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

—Gaston Bachelard, 1960

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

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

—Aristotle, c. 350 BC

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

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

—Aristophanes, 423 BC

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

Nothing worth knowing can be understood with the mind.

—Woody Allen, 1979

Nothing is so easy to fake as the inner vision.

—Robertson Davies, 1985