Quotessence
Home / Topics / Magic Quotes

Magic Quotes

Browse 5346 quotes about Magic.

Related topics

Magic Quotes

“What's important is how we use our time on this earth, not how conspicuously we give our money away. What's important is the energy and courage we are willing to expend reversing entropy, battling cynicism, suffering and challenging mediocre minds, staring down those who would trample our dreams, taking a stand for magic, and advancing the potential of the human race.”

“The discovery of magic can happen only when we transcend our embarrassment about being alive, when we have the bravery to proclaim the goodness and dignity of human life, without either hesitation or arrogance. Then magic can descend onto our existence.”

“One can't write a weird story of real power without perfect psychological detachment from the human scene, and a magic prism of imagination which suffuses them and style alike with that grotesquerie and disquieting distortion characteristic of morbid vision. Only a cynic can create horror - for behind every masterpiece of the sort must reside a driving daemonic force that despises the human race and its illusions, and longs to pull them to pieces and mock them.”

“Art arises in those strange complexities of action that are called human beings. It is a kind of human behavior. As such it is not magic, except as human beings are magical. Nor is it concerned in absolutes, eternities, "forms," beyond those that may reside in the context of the human being and be subject to his vicissitudes. Art is not an inner state of consciousness, whatever that may mean. Neither is it essentially a supreme form of communication. Art is human behavior, and its values are contained in human behavior.”

“No human society is too primitive to have some kind of literature. The only thing is that primitive literature hasn't yet become distinguished from other aspects of life: it's still embedded in religion, magic and social ceremonies.”

“With a little persuasion, any familiar thing can turn abnormal in the mind. Here's a thought experiment. Consider this brutal bit of magic. A human grows a second human in a space inside her belly; she grows a second heart and a second brain, second eyes and second limbs, a complete set of second body parts as if for use as spares, and then, after almost a year, she expels that second screaming being out of her belly and into the world, alive. Bizarre, isn't it?”

“I think the novel is essentially a comic form (tragedy is for the theatre), not meaning by that full of jokes, but that it is about the absurd detail of human life, the way in which one cannot fully understand what is happening. Life is muddle and jumble and ends inconclusively, and when this is presented with great comic art the sorrows of human life can be truthfully conveyed; one is moved by the spectacle, and feels that something truthful has been told in a magic way.”

“Stories ought not to be just little bits of fantasy that are used to wile away an idle hour; from the beginning of the human race stories have been used - by priests, by bards, by medicine men - as magic instruments of healing, of teaching, as a means of helping people come to terms with the fact that they continually have to face insoluble problems and unbearable realities.”

“In The Jaguar's Children we enter the dangerous borderlands between countries and generations; myth and magic; human community and the vast, infinitely mysterious, wild environment. Here, John Vaillant proves that his heart and imagination are as expansive and fierce as his radiant intellect. Never have I encountered a writer with more energy or compassion.”

“Being born on the earth is the highest honor and greatest privilege. To be alive as human beings gives us the chance to pull off exquisite and Herculean feats of magic that are not possible in nirvana or heaven or any other so-called paradise, higher dimension, or better place,being alive right now is the greatest gift i got from God.”

“It seemed to me at an early age that all human communication - whether it's TV, movies, or books - begins with somebody wanting to tell a story. That need to tell, to plug into a universal socket, is probably one of our grandest desires. And the need to hear stories, to live lives other than our own for even the briefest moment, is the key to the magic that was born in our bones.”

“The purpose of ritual is to change the mind of the human being. It's a sacred drama in which you are the audience as well as the participant, and the purpose of it is to activate the parts of the mind that are not activated by everyday activity ... 'Magic' becomes the development of techniques that allow communication with hidden portions of the self, and with hidden portions of all other islands in this 'psychic sea.'”

“The sphere ... which is located beyond our physical world is called the earth zone. It is also known as the zone girdling the earth. This zone has varying degrees of density, the so-called sub-planes, into which human beings enter after they leave their physical bodies. This is the astral world that individuals enter into with their astral bodies after their physical death.”

“In reality, good and evil do not exist, because Divine Providence created nothing that is bad and disharmonious; this is only a human concept. From the hermetic point of view, one type of being has to bring forth positive influences, whereas another type has to bring forth negative influences. In an astral respect these beings are the tools of the effects on our physical world. They are also the cause of all effects in the astral body of every human being, whether they are initiated or not.”

“I don't want to convince you that mathematics is useful. It is, but utility is not the only criterion for value to humanity. Above all, I want to convince you that mathematics is beautiful, surprising, enjoyable, and interesting. In fact, mathematics is the closest that we humans get to true magic. How else to describe the patterns in our heads that - by some mysterious agency - capture patterns of the universe around us? Mathematics connects ideas that otherwise seem totally unrelated, revealing deep similarities that subsequently show up in nature.”

“Religion, mysticism and magic all spring from the same basic 'feeling' about the universe: a sudden feeling of meaning, which human beings sometimes 'pick up' accidentally, as your radio might pick up some unknown station. Poets feel that we are cut off from meaning by a thick, lead wall, and that sometimes for no reason we can understand the wall seems to vanish and we are suddenly overwhelmed with a sense of the infinite interestingness of things.”

“If you paint for product, you have to follow the rules that keep you on the track of your expectation. You have to calculate, organize, plan every move. When you paint for process, you listen to the magic of inner voices, you follow the basic human urge to experiment with the new, the unknown, the mysterious, the hidden. Process is adventure; product happens only within the parameters designed.”

“Sometime in the last 50,000 years, before 12,000 years ago, a kind of paradise came into existence. A situation in which men and women, parents and children, people and animals, human institutions and the land all were in dynamic balance and not in any primitive sense at all. Language was fully developed, poetry may have been at its climax, dance, magic, poetics, altruism, philosophy. There's no reason to think that these things were not practiced as adroitly as we practice them today and it was under the boundary dissolving influence of psilocybin.”

“No waving of enchanted wands but heightened perception. No magic objects, but a transformed and enhanced reality. No spells or chants, but the raw power of the human will to enact supernatural change upon the universal fabric. This is the kind of "magic" that fills Lords of Rainbow - elemental, organic, humanistic - an extension of reality.”

“The CEO should ask what he or she can do to raise the organization's curiosity quotient. One way to do this is to seek to learn more about current or prospective customers, not to figure out which segmentation model to slot them into, but to really understand them as human beings. Another is to live at the intersections where innovation magic occurs.”

“I would say the first key concept is that, in terms of technological and communication progress in human history, the Internet is basically the equivalent of electronic telepathy. We can now communicate all the time through our little magic smartphones with people who are anywhere, all the time, constantly learning what they're thinking, talking about, exchanging messages. And this is a new capability even within the context of the Internet.”

“The problem is that humans have victimized animals to such a degree, that they aren't even considered victims. They aren't even considered at all. They're nothing. They don't count, they don't matter, they're commodities like TV sets and cellphones. We've actually turned animals into inanimate objects - sandwiches and shoes. It is the greatest magic trick ever performed.”

“Poetry has always mattered, through human history, through all kinds of cultures, all kinds of violence and human desolation, as well as periods of great human affirmation. It's been associated with the power of the word, with the sacred, with magic and transformation, with the oral narratives that help a people cohere.”