quotations about magic
Ninety per cent of most magic merely consists of knowing one extra fact.
TERRY PRATCHETT
Night Watch
Major magical artifacts are big business and valuable as hell. Even the express courier companies won't insure them for full value. They're just too likely to be stolen.
CAT ADAMS
The Eldritch Conspiracy
Magic and all that is ascribed to it is a deep presentiment of the powers of science.
RALPH WALDO EMERSON
Essays
Like legend and myth, magic fades when it is unused.
CHARLES DE LINT
The Little Country
It is human nature to want to believe in the wizardry of the magician--but also to turn against him and to scorn him the moment that he commits the slightest error that reveals his trickery. Those in the audience are embarrassed to have been so easily astonished, and they blame the performer for their gullibility.
DEAN KOONTZ
Odd Thomas
I had loved magic tricks from the time I was six or seven. I bought books on magic. I did magic acts for my parents and their friends. I was aiming for show business from early days, and magic was the poor man's way of getting in: you buy a trick for $2, and you've got an act.
STEVE MARTIN
Time Magazine, August 24, 1987
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.
TERRY PRATCHETT
The Light Fantastic
We can choose to function at a lower level of awareness and simply exist, caring for our possessions, eating, drinking, sleeping and managing in the world as pawns of the elements, or we can soar to new and higher levels of awareness allowing ourselves to transcend our environment and literally create a world of our own -- a world of real magic.
WAYNE W. DYER
Real Magic
The trouble with magic is that there's too much it just can't fix. When things go wrong, glimpsing junkyard faerie and crows that can turn into girls and back again doesn't help much. The useful magic's never at hand. The three wishes and the genies in bottles, seven-league boots, invisible cloaks and all. They stay in the stories, while out here in the wide world we have to muddle through as best we can on our own.
CHARLES DE LINT
The Onion Girl
Natural Magick therefore is that, which considering well the strength and force of Natural and Celestial beings, and with great curiosity labouring to discover their affections, produces into open Act the hidden and concealed powers of Nature.
HEINRICH CORNELIUS AGRIPPA
The Vanity of Arts and Sciences
Believe in your heart that you're meant to live a life full of passion, purpose, magic and miracles.
ROY T. BENNETT
The Light in the Heart
Love and magic have a great deal in common. They enrich the soul, delight the heart. And they both take unrelenting and unabating practice.
NORA ROBERTS
Honest Illusions
Magic is a method of talking to the universe in words that it cannot ignore.
NEIL GAIMAN
The Books of Magic: The Invisible Labyrinth
I don't know what holds the bloody world together. Unless it's Magic.
JOHN NEY RIEBER
The Books of Magic: Bindings
True magic is the art and science of changing states of mind at will.
DOUGLAS MONROE
The 21 Lessons of Merlyn
Magic is often lampooned, usually by those who know little about those who practice it, how it works, how its successes and failures can be explained, and how it relateds to religion or science. Apart from those Christians who associate magic with their devil, this denigration is a hangover from when magic was considered a primitive phase of human cultural evolution. According to this prejudice, a primitive belief in magic was followed by the growth of religions and then, quite recently, by progress towards proper scientific experimentation and rationality. In this context, saying that you work magic is like admitting to superstition.
GRAHAM HARVEY
What Do Pagans Believe?
Natural Magick is taken to be nothing else, but the chief power of all the natural Sciences; which therefore they call the top and perfection of Natural Philosophy, and which is indeed the active part of the same; which by the assistance of natural forces and faculties, through their mutual & opportune application, performs those things that are above Human Reason.
HEINRICH CORNELIUS AGRIPPA
The Vanity of Arts and Sciences
It always seemed to me they're sort of alike ... magic and music. Spells and tunes. For one thing, you have to get them just exactly right.
URSULA K. LE GUIN
Tales from Earthsea
And above all, watch with glittering eyes the whole world around you because the greatest secrets are always hidden in the most unlikely places. Those who don't believe in magic will never find it.
ROALD DAHL
The Minpins
Children see magic because they look for it.
CHRISTOPHER MOORE
Lamb: The Gospel According to Biff