Lapham’s Quarterly

I shall curse you with book and bell and candle.

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

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.

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

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

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

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

Everything that deceives does so by casting a spell.

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

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.

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

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.

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.

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

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

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

The fact is certain because it is impossible.

Men willingly believe what they wish.

Bid me discourse, I will enchant thine ear.

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

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

Nothing is so easy to fake as the inner vision.

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.

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

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

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

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

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

Any serious attempt to do anything worthwhile is ritualistic.

Nothing from nothing ever yet was born.

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.

Superstitions are habits rather than beliefs.

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

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

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

Nothing worth knowing can be understood with the mind.

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

God is alive. Magic is afoot.

Egypt was the mother of magicians.

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.

Appearances often are deceiving.