S Quotes
Browse famous quotes beginning with S. This page is a child index of the full Popular Quotes A-Z directory.
“Superstars think like superstars long before the fans or the press anoint them.”
Source: Overachievement: The Science of Working Less to Accomplish More
“Superstición es el opio del público mal informado. Conspiración es el opio del público sobreinformado.”
Source: Vande Vasudhaivam: 100 Sonnets for Our Planetary Pueblo
“Superstición es un aparato psicológico para la autoconservación.”
Source: Divane Dynamite: Only truth in the cosmos is love
“Superstition always begins to step in where religion dies; the gambler has his mascots, and the fortune-tellers reap their harvest, and men believe, or half-believe, in their lucky or unlucky stars.”
Source: Caliban in Grub Street 1930 [Leather Bound]
“Superstition always inspires littleness, religion grandeur of mind; the superstitious raises beings inferior to himself to deities.”
“Superstition, as indigenous to Louisiana as gators and Tabasco, holds that the spirits of the dead avenge any disruption of their bodies, which makes one wonder at the rancor released on the 1957 day when fifty-five white families re-interred their beloved in Hope Mausoleum after the Rt. Rev. Girault M. Jones, Bishop of Louisiana, deconsecrated the Girod Street Cemetery, condemning every last African American bone to anonymity in a mass grave in Providence Memorial Park. From that pogrom grew the Superdome. Thirteen acres of structural steel framing stretch up to 273 feet from the unholy ground, a towering testament to the American propensity to cheer black men into the end zones and desert them entirely six points later.”
Source: Landfall
“Superstition belongs to the essence of mankind and takes refuge, when one thinks one has suppressed it completely, in the strangest nooks and crannies; once it is safely ensconced there, it suddenly reappears.”
“Superstition changes a man to a beast, fanaticism makes him a wild beast, and despotism a beast of burden.”
“Superstition has been defined as the use of a form whose significance has been forgotten.”
Source: The Training & Work of an Initiate
“Superstition has its practical uses.”
“Superstition is a part of the very being of humanity; and when we fancy that we are banishing it altogether, it takes refuge in the strangest nooks and corners, and then suddenly comes forth again, as soon as it believes itself at all safe.”
Source: Maxims and Reflections
“Superstition is a psychological apparatus for self-preservation.”
Source: Divane Dynamite: Only truth in the cosmos is love
“Superstition is a quality that seems indigenous to the ocean.”
“Superstition is an enemy to civil liberty.”
Source: Essays moral, political, and literary. (Life of the author, etc.).
“Superstition is an unreasoning fear of God.”
“Superstition is believing that something means anything and that anything means something and that each thing means a particular thing and will mean a particular thing is coming. Oh yes it does.”
Source: The Gertrude Stein Reader: The Great American Pioneer of Avant-garde Letters
“Superstition is but the fear of belief.”
Source: Desultory Thoughts and Reflections
“Superstition is foolish, childish, primitive and irrational - but how much does it cost you to knock on wood?”
Source: Love and Guilt and the Meaning of Life, Etc.
“Superstition is great enemy of man but bigotry is worse.”
Source: Vivekananda Reader
“Superstition is just another form of thought like any other, a form that accentuates and regulates the association of ideas, it's an exacerbation, an illness, but, in fact, all thought is sickness, which is why no one ever thinks too much, at least most people do their best not to.”
Source: Tomorrow in the Battle Think on Me
“Superstition is just fantasy with attitude; it's a way of erroneously trying to control events.”
“Superstition is more injurious to God than atheism.”
“Superstition is not divinity, any more than phrenology is brain science. Conspiracy is not enlightenment, any more than astrology is astrophysics.”
Source: World War Human: 100 New Earthling Sonnets
“Superstition is not, as has been defined, an excess of religious feeling, but a misdirection of it, an exhausting of it on vanities of man's devising.”
Source: Thoughts and Apophthegms: From the Writings of Archbishop Whateley
“Superstition is only the fear of belief, while religion is the confidence.”
“Superstition is part of the poetry of life.”
Source: The Wisdom of Goethe
“Superstition is related to this life, religion to the next; superstition is allied to fatality, religion to virtue; it is by the vivacity of earthly desires that we become superstitious; it is, on the contrary, by the sacrifice of these desires that we become religious.”
“Superstition is rooted in a much deeper and more sensitive layer of the psyche than skepticism.”
“Superstition is the irrational belief that an object or behavior has the power to influence an outcome, when there's no logical connection between them. Most of us aren't superstitious - but most of us are a 'littlestitious.'”
“Superstition is the need to view the world in terms of simple cause and effect. As I have already said, religious fundamentalism was on the rise, but that is not the type of superstition I am referring to. The superstition that held sway at the time was a belief in simple causes.
Even the plainest of events is tied down by a thick tangle of permutation and possibility, but the human mind struggles with such complexity. In times of trouble, when the belief in simple gods breaks down, a cult of conspiracy arises. So it was back then. Unable to attribute misfortune to chance, unable to accept their ultimate insignificance within the greater scheme, the people looked for monsters in their midst.
The more the media peddled fear, the more the people lost the ability to believe in one another. For every new ill that befell them, the media created an explanation, and the explanation always had a face and a name. The people came to fear even their closest neighbors. At the level of the individual, the community, and the nation, people sought signs of others’ ill intentions; and everywhere they looked, they found them, for this is what looking does.
This was the true challenge the people of this time faced. The challenge of trusting one another. And they fell short”
“Superstition is the need to view the world in terms of simple cause and effect.”
“Superstition is the only religion of which base souls are capable of.”
Source: Pensées of Joubert
“Superstition is the poesy of practical life; hence, a poet is none the worse for being superstitious.”
Source: Goethe's Opinions on the World, Mankind, Literature, Science, and Art
“Superstition is the poetry of life.”
“Superstition is the poetry of life. It is inherent in man's nature; and when we think it is wholly eradicated, it takes refuge in the strangest holes and corners, whence it peeps out all at once, as soon as it can do it with safety.”
“Superstition is the religion of feeble minds.”
“Superstition is the spleen of the soul.”
Source: The Works of Alexander Pope, Esq., with Notes and Illustrations, by Himself and Others. To which are Added, a New Life of the Author, an Estimate of His Poetical Character and Writings, and Occasional Remarks by William Roscoe, Esq
“Superstition is to religion what astrology is to astronomy the mad daughter of a wise mother. These daughters have too long dominated the earth.”
Source: Voltaire: selections
“Superstition is, always has been, and forever will be, the foe of progress, the enemy of education and the assassin of freedom.”
Source: The Works of Robert G. Ingersoll
“Superstition moulds nature into an arbitrary semblance of the supernatural, and then bows down to the work of its own hands.”
Source: Essays and Tales: Fragments from the travels of Theodore Elbert. Thoughts. Tales and apologues
“Superstition originates among ordinary people in the early and all too zealous instruction they receive in religion: they hear of mysteries, miracles, deeds of the Devil, and consider it very probable that things of this sort could occur in everything anywhere.”
“Superstition sets the whole world in flames, but philosophy douses them.”
“Superstition would seem to be simply cowardice in regard to the supernatural.”
Source: Θεοφραστου Χαρακτηρες
“Superstition! that horrid incubus which dwelt in darkness, shunning the light, with all its racks, and poison chalices, and foul sleeping draughts, is passing away without return. Religion cannot pass away. The burning of a little straw may hide the stars of the sky; but the stars are there and will reappear.”
Source: The Carlyle Anthology
“Superstition, bigotry and prejudice, ghosts though they are, cling tenaciously to life; they are shades armed with tooth and claw. They must be grappled with unceasingly, for it is a fateful part of human destiny that it is condemned to wage perpetual war against ghosts. A shade is not easily taken by the throat and destroyed.”
“Superstition, idolatry, and hypocrisy have ample wages, but truth goes a begging.”
Source: The table talk or familiar discourse of Martin Luther, tr. by W. Hazlitt
“Superstition, in all times and among all nations, is the fear of a spirit whose passions are those of a man, whose acts are the acts of a man; who is present in some places, not in others; who makes no places holy and not others; who is kind to one person, unkind to another; who is pleased or angry according to the degree of attention you pay him, or praise you refuse to him; who is hostile generally to human pleasure, but may be bribed by sacrifice of a part of that pleasure into permitting the rest. This, whatever form of faith it colors, is the essence of superstition.”
Source: The Religion of Ruskin: The Life and Works of John Ruskin; a Biographical and Anthological Study
“Superstition, like true love, needs time to grow and reflect upon itself.”
Source: The Stand
“Superstition, then, is engendered, preserved, and fostered by fear.”
“Superstition? Who can define the boundary line between the superstition of yesterday and the scientific fact of tomorrow?”