Quotes About Superstition

Before shows, we rub elbows and growl. It started once when someone had a cold, and we didn't want to hug each other. So we started rubbing elbows. And we don't kiss. We just go, 'Grrrr!'

I knock on my board to unjinx myself.

Before I go on stage, I knock three times. Three is my lucky number; I once went into an audition and was number 333 and got the best part ever.

If a rooster crows while you're thinking about a man," the fortuneteller had once told Maria, "then he's the one you'll marry.

The hand of a man hanged on the gallows has healing powers. If it be stroked across a sore, tumour or goitre, the evil shall pass to the dead man and the sick will be cured. If a woman be barren she should go to a gibbet at night, climb up and reach through the bars and draw the corpse's hand across her womb three or seven times and her curse will leave her. Lincoln

A child's fingernails should never be cut in the first year. The mother must bite them off or he'll become a thief. But when they are first cut at a year old, they must be buried under an ash tree so that witches can't take them and cause the child harm. Lincoln

If anyone fears theft, let him scatter caraway seeds among those things of value and if a thief should try to steal them he shall be held in that place. Likewise, if a woman fears her husband may stray she should sew caraway seeds into his clothes, so that no other woman may steal him away from her. Mistress

Some say the customer the cripples wedding dates back to the time before men were christian. It is said that marrying two cripples together in the graveyard at the community's expense well turn away Divine wrath and protect the village from whatever pestilence or sickness rages around it.

Education is no barometer for superstition

Die Abergläubigsten sind ja stets die in religiösen Dingen Glaubenslosen.

The 'conspiracy theory of society' is a typical result of a secularization of a religious superstition. The belief in the Homeric gods whose conspiracies explain the history of the Trojan War is gone. The gods are abandoned. But their place is filled by powerful men or groups - sinister pressure groups whose wickedness is responsible for all the evils we suffer from - such as the Learned Elders of Zion, or the monopolists, or the capitalists, or the imperialists.

Once there was a gypsy queen who wore on her wrist a chain of six lucky charms - a golden crown, a silver horse, a butterfly caught in amber, a cat's eye shell, a bolt of lightning forged from the heart of a falling star, and the flower of the rue plant, herb of grace. The queen gave each of her six children one of the charms as their lucky talisman, but ever since the chain of charms was broken, the gypsies had been dogged with misfortune.

When Dickens designed false bookcases and books to disguise the door from the drawing room to his study, he invented a seven-volume series facetiously called "The Wisdom of Our Ancestors." In addition to volumes called Superstition, The Block, Ignorance, The Rack, Disease and The Stake, was one simply titled Dirt.

struck fear into medieval hearts—hot baths, which had a dangerously moistening and relaxing effect on the body. Once heat and water created openings through the skin, the plague could easily invade the entire body. For the next two hundred years, whenever the plague threatened, the cry went out: "Bathhouses and bathing, I beg you to shun them or you will die.

For if any adversity, grief, or sickness, or loss of children, corn, cattle, or liberty happen unto them, by and by they exclaim upon witches.

It's a rotten world, Miss Millick,' said Mr. Wran, talking at the window. 'Fit for another morbid growth of superstition. It's time the ghosts, or whatever you call them, took over and began a rule of fear, They'd be no worse than men.' ("Smoke Ghost")

The most startling part was that, if he recalled correctly, the DuMarins' medieval ancestor was none other than Valerian the Alchemist--- the same dark wizard who had laid the Kilburn Curse upon his family. This heritage would've made Kate practically royalty among the Prometheans---and could make her all the more dangerous to him . For beyond superstition, the girl seemed uniquely suited to enchant him.

Decía la leyenda que si los cuervos abandonaban la torre, la corona caería e Inglaterra con ella.

The Opera ghost really existed. He was not, as was long believed, a creature of the imagination of the artists, the superstition of the managers, or a product of the absurd and impressionable brains of the young ladies of the ballet, their mothers, the box-keepers, the cloak-room attendants or the concierge. Yes, he existed in flesh and blood, although he assumed the complete appearance of a real phantom; that is to say, of a spectral shade.

I leave pansies, the symbolic flower of freethought, in memory of the Great Agnostic, Robert Ingersoll , who stood for equality, education, progress, free ideas and free lives, against the superstition and bigotry of religious dogma. We need men like him today more than ever. His writing still inspires us and challenges the 'better angels' of our nature, when people open their hearts and minds to his simple, honest humanity. Thank goodness he was here.

Superstition is the religion of feeble minds; and they must be tolerated in an admixture of it in some trifling or enthusiastic shape or other; else you will deprive weak minds of a resource found necessary to the strongest.

His mind swarmed with superstitious suspicions.

Una de las extravagantes conjeturas que, en las mentes supersticiosas, ya eran inseparables de la Ballena Blanca, era la idea sobrenatural de que Moby Dick era ubicua: que se la había encontrado en latitudes opuestas al mismo tiempo.

Fallow land is kind to children, and keeps off the hexes.