Ralph Waldo Emerson Quotes

Romances I ne'er read like those I have seen.

The Supernatural is only the Natural disclosed.

There is no magic. There are only magicians.

It's a fine line between magic and science. In medieval times, science was magic.

The real name for 'science' is magic.

I don't think there's really observational magic.

Miracles and magic pervade the things that I've written, but yet there are no miracles and there is no magic.

A little science. A little magic. A little chicken soup.

There's tons of magic in the world, and it's all science.

To practice magic is to be a quack; to know magic is to be a sage.

Seeing is not believing - it is only seeing.

The greatest step forward would be to see that everything factual is already theory. The blueness of the sky reveals the basic lawof chromatics. Don't look for anything behind the phenomena, they themselves are the doctrine.

Where lies the line between sorcery and science? It is only a matter of terminology, my friend.

For in the immediate world, everything is to be discerned, for him who can discern it, and central and simply, without either dissection into science, or digestion into art, but with the whole of consciousness, seeking to perceive it as it stands: so that the aspect of a street in sunlight can roar in the heart of itself as a symphony, perhaps as no symphony can: and all of consciousness is shifted from the imagined, the revisive, to the effort to perceive simply the cruel radiation of what is.

The real secret of magic is that there is no magic.

Don't look at the world with your hands in your pockets. To write about it you have to reach out and touch it.

The mind that thought of light, heavy, grey, yellow, still, swift, also conceived of magic that would make heavy things light and able to fly, turn grey lead into yellow gold, and the still rock into a swift water. If it could do the one, it could do the other; it inevitably did both. When we can take green from grass, blue from heaven, and red from blood, we have already an enchanter's power.

If the audience doesn't hear what is going on, is it going on?

This is always history's greatest failure, its inability to believe what it sees, what, almost always, someone sees.

A lot of science started off as magic, where people were burned at the stake for doing science basically.

Yet magic is no more than the art of employing consciously invisible means to produce visible effects. Will, love and imagination are magic powers that everyone possesses; and whoever knows how to develop them to their fullest extent is a magician. Magic has but one dogma, namely, that the seen is the measure of the unseen.

That's all a writer has to write about - what he sees and hears and what not.

As I did more of that, I realized, "Well, maybe I should do more magic."

Can I reject everything my brain experienced? Is intellectual understanding any understanding at all?

All our knowledge hast its origins in our perceptions … In nature there is no effect without a cause … Experience never errs; it is only your judgments that err by promising themselves effects such as are not caused by your experiments … Science is the observation of things possible, whether present or past; prescience is the knowledge of things which may come to pass.