quotations about magic
Many secrets of art and nature are thought by the unlearned to be magical.
ROGER BACON
The Encyclopedia of Science Fiction
You have to believe we are magic, nothin' can stand in our way
You have to believe we are magic, don't let your aim ever stray
And if all your hopes survive, destiny will arrive
I'll bring all your dreams alive, for you.
JOHN FARRAR
"Magic", Xanadu
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
There is magic, but you have to be the magician. You have to make the magic happen.
SIDNEY SHELDON
Are You Afraid of the Dark?
There is no magic. There is only knowledge, more or less hidden.
GENE WOLFE
The Claw of the Conciliator
When magic creates man it may aspire to control him.
R. CASTLETON
attributed, Day's Collacon
The old spelling MAGICK has been adopted throughout in order to distinguish the Science of the Magi from all its counterfeits.
ALEISTER CROWLEY
Magick Book IV
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
First rule of magic: Don't let anyone know your real name. Names have power.
NEIL GAIMAN
The Books of Magic: The Invisible Labyrinth
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
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
Magic exists. Who can doubt it, when there are rainbows and wildflowers, the music of the wind and the silence of the stars? Anyone who has loved has been touched by magic. It is such a simple and such an extraordinary part of the lives we live.
NORA ROBERTS
Charmed
The magician must expect the exposure of his tricks sooner or later, and see what it has required long months of study and time to perfect dissolved in an hour. The very best illusions of the best magicians of a few years ago are now the common property of traveling showmen at country fairs.
ALEXANDER HERRMANN
Cosmopolitan, December 1892
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
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
Like legend and myth, magic fades when it is unused.
CHARLES DE LINT
The Little Country
Ninety per cent of most magic merely consists of knowing one extra fact.
TERRY PRATCHETT
Night Watch
Magic is the ancestor of technology, the ancestor of what we call applied science. Medicine springs from it. The individual medicine man or Big Medicine among the aboriginal inhabitants of this continent was a man who, by reason of special ability and training, was able to do things that the ordinary individual could not do in the way of controlling mysterious forces of nature. The word "medicine" was applied not merely to what we call medicine, but to rain making, cloud making, wind making, getting strength into the war party, harming their enemies, etc. When we want anything done in what we call the arts of technology, we go to a special individual, e.g., physician, engineer, carpenter, plumber, who has a special training. The medicine man was a man technically trained and able to control mysterious forces. Of course, the ordinary member of the tribe as a hunter, fisher, etc., had his training, and he could do the ordinary things in the ordinary way. But if he wanted anything special done, he went to the medicine man--the Shaman.
JOSEPH ALEXANDER LEIGHTON
The Field of Philosophy
Magic is not done, it's not performed. Like any performance art, it withers away to nothing if it's not presented in the grand style. Moving your feet around is not dancing, reading the lyrics is not singing, and pulling a rabbit out of a hat is not magic.
JOHN CASSIDY & MICHAEL STROUD
The Klutz Book of Magic
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