Quotes About Superstition

This idea of body is a simple superstition. It is superstition that makes us happy or unhappy. It is superstition caused by ignorance that makes us feel heat and cold, pain and pleasure.

What is superstition , but misguided, unobjective science? And when it comes down to that, is it to be wondered if people grasp at superstition in this rotten, hate-filled, half-doomed world of today? Lord knows, I'd welcome the blackest of black magic, if it could do anything to stave off the atom bomb.

When not protected by law, by popular favor or superstition, or by other special circumstances, [birds] yield very readily to the influences of civilization, and, though the first operations of the settler are favorable to the increase of many species, the great extension of rural and of mechanical industry is, in a variety of ways, destructive even to tribes not directly warred upon by man.

Patriotism is a superstition, one far more injurious, brutal and inhumane than religion.

You'll find superstition a contagious thing. Some people let it get the better of them.

In all superstition wise men follow fools.

The Long Emergency will be chiefly characterized as a "time out" from technology. It could plunge us into a dark age of superstition. My guess is that we will lose a lot of knowledge and skill. But I also believe the human race desperately needs this "time out."

Clutching our crystals and religiously consulting our horoscopes, our critical faculties in steep decline, unable to distinguish between what's true and what feels good, we slide, almost without noticing, into superstition and darkness.

On the one side was bigotry, ignorance, hatred, superstition, every sort of blackness that the human mind is capable of. On the other side was sense.

There is in superstition a senseless fear of God; religion consists in the pious worship of Him.

Out of abysses of Illiteracy, Through labyrinths of Lies, Across wastelands of Disease . . . We advance Out of dead-ends of Poverty, Through wilderness of Superstition, Across barricades of Jim Crowism . . . We advance.

A quest for knowledge is not a war with faith; spirituality is not usually an infelicitous amalgam of superstition and philistinism; and moral relativism, taken outside midfield, leads inexorably both to heresy and to secular wickedness, which are often identical.

Real religion should be something that liberates men. But churches don't want free men who can think for themself and find their own divinity within. When a religion becomes organized it is no longer a religious experience but only superstition and estrangement.

The peculiar foreign superstition that the English do not like love, the evidence being that they do not talk about it.

Superstition, like true love, needs time to grow and reflect upon itself.

Superstition would seem to be simply cowardice in regard to the supernatural.

when knowledge comes in at the door, fear and superstition fly out of the window.

I maintain that the human mystery is incredibly demeaned by scientific reductionism, with its claim in promissory materialism to account eventually for all of the spiritual world in terms of patterns of neuronal activity. This belief must be classed as a superstition. ... We have to recognize that we are spiritual beings with souls existing in a spiritual world as well as material beings with bodies and brains existing in a material world.

The greatest American superstition is belief in facts.

Fear has been the original parent of superstition, and every new calamity urges trembling mortals to deprecate the wrath of their invisible enemies.

A genuine coincidence always means bad luck for me; it's my only superstition.

It's raw, unbridled superstition for these people to claim that words can harm you.

Learn to feel yourself in other bodies, to know that we are all one. Throw all other nonsense to the winds. Spit out your actions, good or bad, and never think of them again. What is done is done. Throw off superstition. Have no weakness even in the face of death. Be free.

The North thinks it knows how to make corn bread, but this is a gross superstition. Perhaps no bread in the world is quite as good as Southern corn bread, and perhaps no bread in the world is quite as bad as the Northern imitation of it.

Religion is a superstition that originated in man`s mental inability to solve natural phenomena. The Church is an orgainized institution that has always been stumbling to block progress.

There is... in our day, a powerful antidote to nonsense, which hardly existed in earlier times - I mean science. Science cannot be ignored or rejected, because it is bound up with modern technique; it is essential alike to prosperity in peace and to victory in war. That is, perhaps from an intellectual point of view, the most hopeful feature of our age, and the one which makes it most likely that we shall escape complete submersion in some new or old superstition.

A knowledge of history as detailed as possible is essential if we are to comprehend the present and be prepared for the future. Fate...is not the blind superstition or helplessness that waits stupidly for what may happen. Fate is unalterable only in the sense that given a cause, a certain result must follow, but no cause is inevitable in itself, and man can shape his world if he does not resign himself to ignorance.

But, if the knowledge of the occult powers of nature opens the spiritual sight of man, enlarges his intellectual faculties, and leads him unerringly to a profounder veneration for the Creator, on the other hand ignorance, dogmatic narrow-mindedness, and a childish fear of looking to the bottom of things, invariably leads to fetish-worship and superstition.

To get any reason out of the mass of incongruity we call human life, we have to transcend our reason, but we must do it scientifically, slowly, by regular practice, and we must cast off all superstition.

It is no defense of superstition and pseudoscience to say that it brings solace and comfort to people. . . . If solace and comfort are how we judge the worth of something, then consider that tobacco brings solace and comfort to smokers; alcohol brings it to drinkers; drugs of all kinds bring it to addicts; the fall of cards and the run of horses bring it to gamblers; cruelty and violence bring it to sociopaths. Judge by solace and comfort only and there is no behavior we ought to interfere with.

Those afraid of the universe as it really is, those who pretend to nonexistent knowledge and envision a Cosmos centered on human beings will prefer the fleeting comforts of superstition.

The cause of my life has been to oppose superstition. It's a battle you can't hope to win - it's a battle that's going to go on forever. It's part of the human condition.

They that are against Superstition oftentimes run into it of the wrong side. If I will wear all colours but black, then am I superstitious in not wearing black.

It is an infantile superstition of the human spirit that virginity would be thought a virtue and not the barrier that separates ignorance from knowledge.

The prejudices of superstition are superior to all others, and have the strongest influence on the human mind.

Truth without enthusiasm, morality without emotion, ritual without soul, are things Christ unsparingly condemned. Destitute of fire, they are nothing more than a godless philosophy, an ethical system, and a superstition.

Actually, I never tell for whom my songs are written. It's a kind of superstition! I started writing songs for not having the courage to say certain things in people's faces and started to put these feelings on paper... Over the years, became a mania and then I never talk about for whom they are made.

I die adoring God, loving my friends, not hating my enemies, and detesting superstition.

Man's mind is like a store of idolatry and superstition; so much so that if a man believes his own mind it is certain that he will forsake God and forge some idol in his own brain.

I have recently been examining all the known superstitions of the world and do not find in our particular superstition [Christianity] one redeeming feature.

We have fought long and hard to escape from medieval superstition. I, for one, do not wish to go back.

An extraterrestrial being, newly arrived on Earth - scrutinizing what we mainly present to our children in television, radio, movies, newspapers, magazines, the comics, and many books - might easily conclude that we are intent on teaching them murder, rape, cruelty, superstition, credulity, and consumerism. We keep at it, and through constant repetition many of them finally get it.

Reason, which is the glory of our nature, is destined eventually, in the progress of future ages, to overturn the empire of superstition.

We are now returning to the 18th century empirical approach with the new interest in the evolutionary basis of ethics, with 'experimental' moral philosophy and moral psychology. As a result, we understand better why moral formulas are experienced as ineluctable commands, even if there is no commander and even if the notion of an inescapable obligation is just superstition. So moral philosophy has made huge progress.

All religions are ancient monuments to superstition, ignorance and ferocity.

Science and reason liberate us from the shackles of superstition by offering us a framework for understanding our shared humanity. Ultimately, we all have the capacity to treasure life and enrich the world in incalculable ways.

The intellectual advancement of man depends on how often he can exchange an old superstition for a new truth.

Prejudice is not bigotry or superstition, although prejudice sometimes may degenerate into these. Prejudice is pre-judgment, the answer with which intuition and ancestral consensus of opinion supply a man when he lacks either time or knowledge to arrive at a decision predicated upon pure reason.