Quotes About Superstition

When...did it become irrational to dislike religion, any religion, even to dislike it vehemently? When did reason get redescribed as unreason? When were the fairy stories of the superstitious placed above criticism, beyond satire? A religion was not a race. It was an idea, and ideas stood (or fell) because they were strong enough (or too weak) to withstand criticism, not because they were shielded from it. Strong ideas welcomed dissent.

As manuals for contemplative understanding, the Bible and the Koran are worse than useless. Whatever wisdom can be found in their pages is never best found there, and it is subverted, time and again, by ancient savagery and superstition.

All the same, there were some things they needed to learn. Do not drink milk after a thunderstorm, for it will certainly be sour. Always leave out seed for the birds when the first snow falls. Wash your hair with rosemary. Drink lavender tea when you cannot sleep. Know that the only remedy for love is to love more.

Three hundred years ago people believed in the devil. They believed if an incident could not be explained, then the cause was something wicked, and that cause was often a woman who was said to be a witch. Women who did as they pleased, women with propriety, women who had enemies, women who took lovers, women who knew about the mysteries of childbirth, all were suspect (…)

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.

On some nights it was best to remember the past, and not shut it in a drawer. Three hundred years ago people believed in the devil. They believed if an incident could not be explained, then the cause was something wicked, and that cause was often a woman who was said to be a witch. Women who did as they pleased, women with property, women

She takes the fortune cookies from the bottom of the bag and throws them into a glass bowl she keeps in the closet. She has no desire to know what her future might hold.

No walking in the moonlight, no Ouija boards, no candles, no red shoes, no wearing black, no going shoeless, no amulets, no night-blooming flowers, no reading novels about magic, no cats, no crows, and no venturing below Fourteenth Street. Yet no matter

For women who wanted a child, mistletoe was to be strung over their beds. If that had no effect, they must tie nine knots in a strong rope, then burn the rope and eat the ashes and soon enough they would conceive.

A glass breaking on its own portended death.

Black cats can do that to some people: They make them go all shivery and scared and remind them of dark.

They believed babies who died in their cradles had the life sucked out of them by Satan's emissaries or by cats, which were thought to be untrustworthy, evil creatures.

For more than two hundred years, the Owens women have been blamed for everything that has gone wrong in town.

What did I fear, and why? — I, to whom the night had been a more familiar face than that of man — I, in whom that element of hereditary superstition from which none of us is altogether free had given to solitude and darkness and silence only a more alluring interest and charm!

HEATHEN, n. A benighted creature who has the folly to worship something that he can see and feel.

Never take eggs from a metal-eyed man.

There are those at both ends of the social scale who would have us change direction!" Curnsbick was shouting. "Those who would not only try to dam the river of progress but have it flow uphill! Who would break, burn and murder in the name of dragging us back into a glorious past that never truly was. A place of ignorance, superstition, squalor and fear. A place of darkness! But there will be no going

Acaso el diagnóstico médico de nuestros tiempos modernos no equivale en realidad a un maleficio vudú?

Wayne was certain dogs were as superstitious as humans. More, maybe.

What is this reason, with its universality, infallibility, exuberant certainty and obviousness? An ens rationis, a stuffed dummy which the howling superstition of our unreason endows with divine attributes.

If you don't want to see the biggest fool in your life; break your bedroom mirror.

Superstition is part of the poetry of life.

And think how he has been brought up-, free from all the superstition and ignorance that lead men to hate one another in the name of God.

For above all the dread and uncertainty in which ignorant people lived like children in the dark – frightened of witches and wizards, of the Devil and evil spirits – above it all was the bright starlit sky of the new faith, showing them the way.