Archive

Quotes

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

—Italo Calvino, 1967

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 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

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

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

—Robert Wilson, 1991

Everything that deceives does so by casting a spell.

—Plato, c. 375 BC

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

—Plotinus, c. 255

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

Nothing from nothing ever yet was born.

—Lucretius, c. 58 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

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

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