Mystical Beliefs Quotes

As a boy, I found myself drawn to Arthurian legends, and then to Celtic mythology, and then further east into the mysticism of Asian religions.

And I had by now become used to the idea of witchcraft, it seemed a reasonable thing, so many things are about, at night, in Africa.

Men think epilepsy divine, merely because they do not understand it. But if they called everything divine which they do not understand, why, there would be no end of divine things.

Astrology and all these mystical things are generally signs of a weak mind

And the druids, they were into sex and death in an interesting night-time telly sort of way.

Mysticism has been in the past and probably ever will be one of the great powers of the world, and it is bad scholarship to pretend the contrary. You may argue against it but you should no more treat it with disrespect than a perfectly cultivated writer would treat (say) the Catholic Church or the Church of Luther no matter how much he disliked them.

In my research, I learned that the Boxers' kung fu wasn't all that formalized. The vast majority of them didn't belong to some age-old martial arts tradition. They were basically poor, starving teenagers doing the best they could to figure out how to fight, relying more on their mystical beliefs than formal training.

Our mind has its history, just as our body has its history. You might be just as astonished that man has an appendix, for instance. Does he know he ought to have an appendix? He is just born with it....Our unconscious mind, like our body, is a storehouse of relics and memories of the past. A study of the structure of the unconscious collective mind would reveal the same discoveries as you make in comparative anatomy. We do not need to think that there is anything mystical about it.

As a young man I was scornful about the supernatural but as I have got older, the sharp line that divided the credible from the incredible has tended to blur; I am aware that the whole world is slightly incredible

Supernatural does not mean methodological stupidity.

Myth is the secret opening through which the inexhaustible energies of the cosmos pour into human manifestation.

There's always someone who secretly believes in myths and legends; or at least parts of them. Those are the people who will look beyond the obvious and see things in this world that are truly wonderful... But they won't say anything, even if they do. Because the rest of us who view the world as logical and scientific wouldn't see the truth if it was posted up on a billboard.

Witchcraft to the ignorant, .... Simple science to the learned.

As long as vitalism and spiritualism are open questions so long will the gateway of science be open to mysticism.

Around 1974, I graduated into the occult, and spent a sold six or seven years immersed in the Kabala and the Chaldean, Celtic, and Druidic traditions I also became fascinated with Aleister Crowley, the nineteenth-century magician who shared these beliefs.

Not that that mystical stuff's necessarily true: The only thing that's capital-T true is that you get to decide how you're going to try to see it.

The sufis believe that they can experience something more complete.

The druidical claims for Stonehenge seem to belong to that bonkers-but-persistent strand of Englishness that believes there is something particularly mystical about the English themselves, who were clearly a chosen people.

I don't differentiate much, except in degree, between people who believe in religion from those who believe in astrology, magic or the supernatural.

In the war of magic and religion, is magic ultimately the victor? Perhaps priest and magician were once one, but the priest, learning humility in the face of God, discarded the spell for prayer.

I love mysticism - it's such fun.

There are certain mystical belief systems that believe that taking pictures takes an aspect of the soul, but beyond that it's just the idea that once you're captured in a photograph, then a million presumptions are made of you, and you are forever frozen in that one moment, and you are perceived to be the embodiment of that moment, and that, of course, is an illusion.

Personally, I'm a lazy kind of guy, and leaving the door open on the mystical saves me work. I don't have to stress my brain trying to explain the unexplainable. It's magic. End of discussion.

In recent years there's been a lot of philosophical theorising about how important magic is, and how it takes us back to a childlike state of astonishment. I think all this is just nonsense. Magic isn't meaningful or important other than how you're performing it in that moment.