💬 Quotes

"To us, a fish was a fish, no matter what it looked like; but to the Nevada judge, it was property."

"If you hold a cat by the tail you learn things you cannot learn any other way."

"Because man has hitherto for the most part shaped his views of the universe in accordance with his own ignorant preconceptions, he has inadvertently filled it with phantoms and hobgoblins of his own creation."

"Magic is a spurious system of natural law as well as a fallacious guide of life; it is a false science as well as an abortive art."

"The fatal flaw of magic lies not in its assumption that the same causes produce the same effects—a assumption which it shares with science—but in its total misconception of the nature of the particular causes which produce them."

"As in the ages gone by, the king was slain in the character of a god, so now he is slain in the character of a representative of the people."

"We must not be surprised to find that custom persists long after the reason for it has been forgotten, and that myths are often invented to explain practices whose true origin is lost in the mists of antiquity."

"Without the path cleared by magic and religion, the scientific intellect of man could hardly have found its way through the vast and dark labyrinth of nature."

"Civil disobedience is not our only weapon, but it is the ultimate one by which men who lack power can make their conscience felt."

"True awakening is not a sudden flash of light, but the slow, often painful peeling away of the illusions we mistook for reality."

"We spend the first half of our lives building cages of expectations, and the second half trying to remember how to fly."

"To look inward requires a courage far greater than any battle fought in the physical world; it demands that we face the stranger looking back at us in the mirror."

"Silence is not the absence of sound, but the presence of a deeper truth waiting for the noise of the world to subside."

"Transformation is rarely comfortable. It asks you to surrender the person you were told to be in order to discover the soul you actually are."

"Once the veil is lifted, you cannot un-see the patterns of your own captivity. Freedom begins the moment you refuse to play your assigned part."

"There is no security against the ultimate development of mechanical consciousness, in the fact of machines possessing no consciousness now."

"Illness of any kind is considered to be just as much a matter of course as any moral lapse, and is dealt with accordingly."

"The people of Erewhon look upon ill-health as a crime which calls for punishment, rather than as an affliction which calls for sympathy."

"If a man goes up to the university, his parents expect him to unlearn all the vulgar prejudices which had been instilled into him at nursery."

"To imagine that each one of us is an automaton is just as absurd as to imagine that the machine is a soul-possessing being."