Samuel Johnson Quotes

I am saying that while popular culture usually portrays practitioners of magic as separate from ordinary people, often biologically different, many people have habits or customs or superstitions that show magic was once a whole lot more democratic.

Superstition is foolish, childish, primitive and irrational - but how much does it cost you to knock on wood?

Everyone has this notion of the Middle Ages - certainly the early Middle Ages - as being this very superstitious era. I think that all eras are superstitious. We all have our magical thinking.

I don't believe in voodoo.

Religion is something left over from the infancy of our intelligence, it will fade away as we adopt reason and science as our guidelines.

I believe in rituals.

I belong to the middle class that grew up very influenced by the Catholic church. The people of the novel are from a more pagan and practical world in which the Christianity is just a veneer.

Superstitions and belief in magic are perennial in just the same way as religion, and something near to being universal among mankind; and why this is so may be interesting, but in most cases the beliefs themselves are devoid of interesting content, at least to me.

In the absence of evidence, superstition. It's a Middle Ages thing. That's my theory anyway.

Let me make the superstitions of a nation and I care not who makes its laws …

Religion has ever filled the mind of man with darkness, and kept him in ignorance of his real duties and true interests. It is only by dispelling the clouds and phantoms of Religion, that we shall discover Truth, Reason, and Morality. Religion diverts us from the causes of evils, and from the remedies which nature prescribes; far from curing, it only aggravates, multiplies, and perpetuates them.

The evergreen played an influential role in the spiritual life of early societies throughout the world. Archaeological and anthropological evidence indicates that veneration of the tree dates from at least 4000 years before Christ … These pagan beliefs survive to this day embedded in religious rituals and myths as well as secular customs, legends and fairy tales

Folklore provides a socially sanctioned outlet for the discussion of the forbidden and taboo.

Primitive superstition lies just below the surface of even the most tough-minded individuals, and it is precisely those who most fight against it who are the first to succumb to its suggestive effects.

To get any reason out of the mass of incongruity we call human life, we have to transcend our reason, but we must do it scientifically, slowly, by regular practice, and we must cast off all superstition.

In certain countries, people seem to be think that three asses together make one intelligent person. However, that is completely wrong. Several asses in concreto make the ass in abstracto and that is a most terrifying animal.

Therell always be some weird thing about eating four grapes before you go to bed, or drinking a special tea, or buying this little bean from El Salvador.

The master of superstition, is the people; and in all superstition, wise men follow fools; and arguments are fitted to practice, in a reversed order.

For out of fear and need each religion is born, creeping into existence on the byways or reason.

Superstition sets the whole world in flames, but philosophy douses them.

A peasant can no more help believing in a traditional superstition than a horse can help trembling when be sees a camel.

It's extremely unlucky to be superstitious, for no other reason than it is always unlucky to be colossally stupid.

It has affected me very much in the last 10 years. I get it from my grandmother. She was very superstitious as well. I'm funny about numbers. It's become a phobia, so I have to watch it. It affects your day a lot. Before I go on stage, there are certain things I do that are semi-sort of Gypsy superstitious things, but I'm coping with them. It hasn't affected the music, thank God. If you got really bad, you'd say "I'll pick that note instead of that one or sing this song before that.

Never look at other people's bad fortune,' my mother said. 'If you do, it will come back to find you instead of its rightful owner.

I'd never believed in luck. Never had any cause to. Never relied on it, because I never could.