Quotes About Superstition

jumping the broom," in lieu of or in addition to the exchange of vows. The bride and groom would each jump backwards over a broom handle held a few inches above the floor, and raised slightly with each leap. Whoever stumbled first was, according to lore, forced to heed the wishes of the other.

Look, I whisper to Cat, Shooting star! That's good luck. She rolls her eyes. It's a plane, you idiot, she says, and when I look again I can see that she's right. Typical.

Persecutions of witches, erroneously associated with the Middle Ages, became widespread only during the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries.

When people learn no tools of judgment and merely follow their hopes, the seeds of political manipulation are sown."11 As individuals and as a society, we should be less accepting of superstition and sloppy thinking, and should strive to develop those "habits of mind" that promote a more accurate view of the world.

History warns us that it is the customary fate of new truths to begin as heresies and to end as superstitions.

Fear of power invisible, feigned by the mind, or imagined from tales publicly allowed, [is] religion; not allowed, superstition.

I have examined all the known superstitions of the world,and I do not find in our particular superstition of Christianity one redeeming feature. They are all alike founded on fables and mythology. Millions of innocent men women and children since the introduction of Christianity,have been burnt, tortured, fined and imprisoned. What has been the effect of this coercion? To make one half the world fools and the other half hypocrites; to support roguery and error all over the earth.

The religious answer is not really religious if it's not fully real. Evasion is the answer of superstition.

On the doorsill the Paranoids, as we leave milk to propitiate the leprechaun, had set a fifth of Jack Daniels.

My grandfather used to say that God's tonic for someone was physical labor. She also felt toads caused infertility, but that was another issue.

Among the Bemba of Northern Rhodesia, for example, it is said that to find a beehive with honey in the woods is good luck; to find two beehives is very good luck; to find three is witchcraft.

When a man was found dead at the well in 1630 after having made scoffing remarks about its supposed powers a local jury brought in a verdict of death by divine judgement.74

THE belief in lucky and unlucky days goes back at least to classical times. The Romans had their dies nefasti, and similar concepts were widespread in China and the ancient East. Indeed the idea that certain days are, for some occult reason, propitious for certain actions, and others inappropriate, is to be found among most pre-industrial peoples. It

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.

The stubborn reluctance of the lower sections of the seventeenth-century population to forgo their charmers and wise men resembles the unwillingness of some primitive peoples today to rely exclusively upon the newly introduced Western medicine.

This was a new menace that threatened them, something that they couldn't explain; and so, naturally, it aroused within them superstitious fear.

Foul Superstition! howsoe'er disguised, Idol, saint, virgin, prophet, crescent, cross, For whatsoever symbol thou art prized, Thou sacerdotal gain, but general loss! Who from true worship's gold can separate thy dross?

She hissed, right there behind my ear, and I had the horrible idea she was spitting maggots into my hair. Why maggots were a problem when I was about to be dead, I didn't know, but the idea completely grossed me out. "In the womb I heard you die, for no one lives when a banshee cries." I wasn't just going to die. I was going to be rhymed to death. That simply wasn't fair.

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.

nuestra actitud moderna habla con orgullo de las tinieblas de la superstición y de la credulidad medieval o primitiva, olvidando por completo que con nosotros llevamos todo el pasado, escondido en los sótanos del rascacielos que es nuestra conciencia racional.

We do not shoot craps with human teeth.

The greatest impact of the Darwinian revolution...was that it completed the liberation from superstition and fear that began in the physical sciences a few centuries before. Man, too, is a natural phenomenon. [in "The evolutionary concept of man", 1972, p. 35.]

Those books made it crystal clear that giving honey to your baby before he was a year old made you a terrible mother. The moment a spoon of honey would touch his lips, the words "Awful Mother" would appear on your forehead, forever branding you as a parenting failure.

We must not, however, begin with theology. The religion which is founded merely on theology can never contain anything of morality. Hence we derive no other feelings from it but fear on the one hand, and hope of reward on the other, and this produces merely a superstitious cult. Morality, then, must come first and theology follow; and that is religion.