There are some things, after all, that Sally Owens knows for certain: Always throw spilled salt over your left shoulder. Keep rosemary by your garden gate. Add pepper to your mashed potatoes. Plant roses and lavender, for luck. Fall in love whenever you can.
It's extremely unlucky to be superstitious, for no other reason than it is always unlucky to be colossally stupid.
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.
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.
One of my superstitions is I'm not allowed to talk about them.
I think hiccup cures were really invented for the amusement of the patient's friends.
I'm always like, 'I can't believe I sound like my mother.' I remember running out of the house telling, 'Put your shoes on or you're going to get sick!' That's an old wives' tale, but it's like some weird mind control that I would be like that.
Not the man in the moon, not the groaning-board, not the speaking of friar Bacon's brazen- head, not the inspiration of mother Shipton, or the miracles of Dr. Faustus, things as certain as death and taxes, can be more firmly believed.
He tells old wives' tales much to the point.
I had been fed, in my youth, a lot of old wives' tales about the way men would instantly forsake a beautiful woman to flock around a brilliant one. It is but fair to say that, after getting out in the world, I had never seen this happen." [From a column dated November 17, 1928]
In all superstition wise men follow fools.
If there's any illness for which people offer many remedies, you may be sure that particular illness is incurable, I think.
Superstition is the spleen of the soul.
Nothing is going to happen to you if you throw salt on the floor, stand under a ladder, or see eight black cats on the street.
Superstitions are, for the most part, but the shadows of great truths.
I'm superstitious a little bit.
My mother was Irish and she was superstitious, if you'll forgive the tautology.
Superstition is, always has been, and forever will be, the foe of progress, the enemy of education and the assassin of freedom.
