Magic (supernatural)

"A Thaum is the basic unit of magical strength. It has been universally established as the amount of magic needed to create one small white pigeon or three normal-sized billiard balls."

"Too much magic could wrap time and space around itself, and that wasn't good news for the kind of person who had grown used to things like effects following things like causes."

"The senior wizard in a world of magic had the same prospects of long-term employment as a pogo stick tester in a minefield."

"Magicians and scientists are, on the face of it, poles apart. Certainly, a group of people who often dress strangely, live in a world of their own, speak a specialized language and frequently make statements that appear to be in flagrant breach of common sense have nothing in common with a group of people who often dress strangely, speak a specialized language, live in … er ..."

"Ninety per cent of most magic merely consists of knowing one extra fact."

"This is the school, isn't it. The magic place? The world. Here. And you don't realize it until you look. Do you know the pictsies think this world is heaven? We just don't look. You can't give lessons on witchcraft. Not properly. It's all about who you are... you, I suppose."

"Christopher Priest [on his use of the term "The Prestige"]: I noticed its closeness to the magicians' word "prestidigitation" (sleight of hand) I realized it would make a perfect title for the book I was then planning. This sort of coincidence is always valuable to a novelist. Don Iffergrin: But "prestige" is a word magicians have used for centuries. Christopher Priest: A lot of people think that, including contemporary magicians. In fact, its use as a magical word only goes back to 1995. I made the whole thing up. It has entered magicians' language already."

"I'm just a novelist. I don't even know how most tricks are done — it's all in the performance, because magical secrets are never that complex. At the risk of sounding pretentious, my main interest in stage magic is its metaphorical nature in relation to art. For instance, I've always been interested in misdirecting my readers in my novels, and magicians use techniques of misdirection that are similar. This isn't sleight of hand: real misdirection is when the performer allows or encourages his audience to make assumptions about what they are seeing … or in my case, assumptions about what they are reading."

"The first fall of snow is not only an event, it is a magical event. You go to bed in one kind of a world and wake up in another quite different, and if this is not enchantment then where is it to be found?"

"The end of magicks among the people of Gyrvan marked the close of an age of insanity, when men sought to be gods. Her people had turned to a disciple of Truth and Knowledge, shunning all occult affairs. They had unraveled the secrets of the world around them, to understand the interlocking forces that moved within Nature. Theirs became the power of reality, not sorceries and spells woven by capricious deities."

"In Welsh myth, the goddess Ceridwen owned a great cauldron that would magically produce nourishing food — when commanded by a spell known only to the goddess. In modern science, Buckminster Fuller gave us the concept of "ephemeralization", technology becoming both more effective and less expensive as the physical resources invested in early designs are replaced by more and more information content. Arthur C. Clarke connected the two by observing that "Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic". To many people, the successes of the open-source community seem like an implausible form of magic. High-quality software materializes for free, which is nice while it lasts but hardly seems sustainable in the real world of competition and scarce resources. … what spell is the goddess speaking?"

"There's a bit of magic in everything, and some loss to even things out."

"I don't know what holds the bloody world together. Unless it's Magic."

"Disbelief in magic can force a poor soul into believing in government and business."

"Love and magic have a great deal in common. They enrich the soul, delight the heart. And they both take practice."

"Avoid all magic and pseudo-occultism! Without the proper development and broadening of consciousness, all the widespread suggestions for the sliding out of the astrosom, and other externalizations, conjurations and other manifestations, might be harmful. (28 August 1931)"

"Writing is perhaps the greatest of human inventions, binding together people, citizens of distant epochs, who never knew each other. Books break the shackles of time, proof that humans can work magic."

"Sorcerer, you do have magical powers, but where is your sense?"

"It probably does make some kinds of magic easier, if no one made a concerted effort to teach you natural philosophy."

"Thy sweet magic brings together What stern Custom spreads afar; All men become brothers Where thy happy wing-beats are."

"Henry: There ain't no such thing as magic, is there?"

"Art is the magic mirror you make to reflect your invisible dreams in visible pictures. You use a glass mirror to see your face: you use works of art to see your soul. But we who are older use neither glass mirrors nor works of art. We have a direct sense of life. When you gain that you will put aside your mirrors and statues, your toys and your dolls."

"I wear this Saint Christopher medal sometimes because — I'm Jewish — but my boyfriend is Catholic. It was cute, the way he gave it to me. He said if it doesn't burn through my skin, it will protect me. Who cares? Different religions. The only time it's an issue, I suppose, would be like if you're having a baby and you've got to figure out how you want to raise it. Which still wouldn't be an issue for us, because we'd be … honest, and just say, you know, like, "Mommy is one of the chosen people … and daddy believes that Jesus is magic!""

"In a world full of audio visual marvels, may words matter to you and be full of magic."

"Have the courage to say no. Have the courage to face the truth. Do the right thing because it is right. These are the magic keys to living your life with integrity."

"In spite of the dominance of mechanistic thought in the contemporary world, a perplexing residue of the magical tradition still survives in the form of several issues, solutions to which do not appear possible within the context of a purely mechanical view of the world. … It is important to recognize that the materialist, scientific paradigm that dominates the late twentieth century world and provides the basis for its dominant institutions, has its basis in the life and work of Pythagoras, one of the most significant representatives of the perennial philosophy and a founder of the magical tradition. This spirit, which gave rise to our world view, is a spirit that must be recaptured if our civilization is to flourish. The choice is a clear one to many, and was summed up in a book title by the late Pythagorean and futurist Buckminster Fuller, Utopia or Oblivion."

"Indeed, what is magic but impossible science?"

"Formerly, when religion was strong and science weak, men mistook magic for medicine; now, when science is strong and religion weak, men mistake medicine for magic."

"One dream, one soul, one prize One goal, one golden glance of what should be It's a kind of magic One shaft of light that shows the way No mortal man can win this day It's a kind of magic The bell that rings inside your mind Is challenging the doors of time It's a kind of magic The waiting seems eternity The day will dawn of sanity."

"All we can perceive, experience, think about, is the surface layer of reality, less than the tip of an iceberg. Underneath the surface appearance, everything is not only connected with everything else, but also with the Source of all life out of which it came. p. 19 If you can recognize illusion as illusion, it dissolves. The recognition of illusion is also its ending. Its survival depends on your mistaking it for reality. In the seeing of who you are not, the reality of who you are emerges by itself. p. 20 When the ego is at war, know that it is no more than an illusion that is fighting to survive... All that is required to become free of the ego is to be aware of it, since awareness and ego are incompatible. Awareness is the power that is concealed within the present moment. p. 50"

"It is clear from Gurdjieff's writings that hypnotism, mesmerism and various arcane methods of expanding consciousness must have played a large part in the studies of the Seekers of Truth. None of these processes, however, is to be thought of as having any bearing on what is called Black Magic, which, according to Gurdjieff, "has always one definite characteristic. It is the tendency to use people for some, even the best of aims, without their knowledge and understanding, either by producing in them faith and infatuation or by acting upon them through fear. There is, in fact, neither red, green nor yellow magic. There is 'doing.' Only 'doing' is magic." Properly to realise the scale of what Gurdjieff meant by magic, one has to remember his continually repeated aphorism, "Only he who can be can do," and its corollary that, lacking this fundamental verb, nothing is "done," things simply "happen.""

"I don't want realism. I want magic! Yes, yes, magic. I try to give that to people. I do misrepresent things. I don't tell truths. I tell what ought to be truth."