Quotes About Magic

Seize this very minute; what you can do, or dream you can, begin it; Boldness has genius, power and magic in it. —Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

Money is the opposite of magic. Art is magic. The

It would be tempting to explain this long survival of magical practices by pointing out that they helped to provide many professional wizards with a respectable livelihood. The example of the legal profession is a reminder that it is always possible for a substantial social group to support itself by proffering solutions to problems which they themselves have helped to manufacture.

If magic is to be defined as the employment of ineffective techniques to allay anxiety when effective ones are not available, then we must recognize that no society will ever be free from it.

You know children, always playing with the forces of darkness.

No wizard has ever made himself useful by magic, or, if they've tried, they've only made matters worse. No wizard ever stopped a war or mended a fence. It's better that they stay in their marshes, out of the way of worldly folk like farmers and soldiers and merchants and kings.

You should never poison a witch.

Wizards are always hungry.

Real magic is as joyful and sad as a jazz funeral, as pretty and as dangerous as white oleander. If you want to experience the spirit world, be ready for beauty that will bring tears to your eyes and for terrors that will scare you witless.

Writing must have an element of magic to it. When that magic takes over, the writer himself loses track of time during the writing—and the reader will lose track of time during the reading. If you're happy at work and think of it as your own private briar patch—a place of escape from the world in which time is your time—the clock of life becomes your clock, and even the thorns in that briar patch are of your own choosing.

That romance is nowhere as vividly encapsulated as in that moment when a pile of hard, almost odorless gray-green seeds is suddenly and magically transformed into the fragrant vehicle of our dreams, reveries, and conversation. To be the magicians waving the wand of transformation makes that metamorphosis all the more stirring and resonant.

I am the magical mouseI don't eat cheeseI eat sunsetsAnd the tops of trees.

Sottoportico San Zaccaria" It rains on the roofs As it rains in my poems Under the thunder We fit together like parts Of a magic puzzle Twelve winds beat the gulls from the sky And tear the curtains And lightning glisters On your sweating breasts Your face topples into dark And the wind sounds like an army Breaking through dry reeds We spread our aching bodies in the window And I can smell the odor of hay In the female smell of Venice

Why are we so unhappy despite our material affluence? [...] [T]he modern world has lost the art of "ordinary magic" - the art of transforming our ordinary, mundane, and perhaps humdrum existence into a life of beauty and joy.

When objects first became popular, subclassing seemed like a magic pill. First, subclasses were used for classification—a Train was a subclass of Vehicle regardless of whether they shared any implementation. In time, some people saw that since what inheritance did was share implementation, it could most effectively be used to factor out common bits of implementation. Quickly, though, the limitations of subclassing became apparent.

Competence is the creed of the technocrat who makes sure the gears mesh but doesn't for a second understand the magic of the machine.

Still Time, great wizard of this earth, Who holds o'er human minds such sway! Oft bids to scenes of later birth Old recollections to give way.

Ah, vice! how soft are they voluptuous ways, While boyish blood is mantling, who can 'scape The fascination of thy magic gaze? A cherub-hydra round us dost thou gape, And mould to every taste thy dear delusive shape.

cuando veía actuar a uno de sus «colegas», estaba en la misma situación que un niño de cinco años: le parecía magia.

Tiene razón Laiseca: la grandeza y la eficacia de un mago se mide por su renuncia al uso de la magia. El mago de verdad, el más grande, es el más pobre y desamparado de los mortales. Porque entre su magia y su persona se interpone el olvido, en la forma del mundo.

Magic's the fifth element, along with earth, air, fire, and water, from which everything is composed.

Jung introduced the idea of synchronicity to strip off the fantasy, magic, and superstition which surround and are provoked by unpredictable, startling, and impressive events that, like these, appear to be connected.

Magic is a way of living. If one has done one's best to steer the chariot, and one then notices that a greater other is actually steering it, then magical operation takes place. One cannot say what the effect of magic will be, since no one can know it in advance because the magical is the lawless, which occurs without rules and by chance, so to speak. But the condition is that one totally accepts it and does not reject it, in order to transfer everything to the growth of the tree.

But, as once Gilgamesh, bringing back the magic herb from the Western Land (cf. pl. XIX), was robbed of his treasure by the demon-serpent, so Hölderlin's poem dies away in a painful lament, which tells us that his descent to the shadows will be followed by no resurrection in this world: