Supernatural Beliefs Quotes

I just told you I wasn't a Satanist.

Religion is a species of mental disease.

Many people told me such convincing ghost stories that I felt that there really were ghosts, though I hadn't seen any. And though I still haven't seen a ghost, I feel that they are all around us; we are just not aware of them being there.

The spells are made up. I have met people who assure me, very seriously, that they are trying to do them, and I can assure them, just as seriously, that they don’t work.

Myths are public dreams, dreams are private myths.

Do I believe in Witchcraft? I'm the result of it.

Disbelieve nothing wonderful concerning the gods, nor concerning divine dogmas.

I'm not, like - what's the word when you believe in a lot of magic? Superstitious.

I don't believe that people die and come back as spirits, but I think there might be some unexplained events.

Superstition is an unreasoning fear of God.

Witch-hunts are always spooked by women's horrifying sexuality awakened by the superstud Devil.

One of the things I did during my 17 years as a psychiatric social worker was go around and find people with mental crutches, and every time I found one, I kicked those goddamn crutches until they flew. You know what happened? Every single one of those people has been able to walk without the crutches better, in fact. Were they giving up anything intrinsically valuable? Just their irrational reliance upon superstitions and supernatural nonsense. Perhaps this sort of claptrap was good for the Stone Age, when people actually believed that if they prayed for rain they would get it.

I was raised as a Catholic. I went to a Jesuit school - obviously, being from Ireland, was brought up in quite a regimented belief structure. I shed a lot of that rigidity and got a sense that there are definitely forces that we don't understand. I think 'magic.' It's a word to apply to some of those things.

Danger is the very basis of superstition. It produces a searching after help supernaturally when human means are no longer supposed to be available.

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.

Religion has ever filled the mind of man with darkness, and kept him in ignorance of his real duties and true interests. It is only by dispelling the clouds and phantoms of Religion, that we shall discover Truth, Reason, and Morality. Religion diverts us from the causes of evils, and from the remedies which nature prescribes; far from curing, it only aggravates, multiplies, and perpetuates them.

As long as a population can be induced to believe in a supernatural hereafter, it can be oppressed and controlled. People will put up with all sorts of tyranny, poverty, and painful treatment if they're convinced that they'll eventually escape to some resort in the sky where lifeguards are superfluous and the pool never closes. Moreover, the faithful are usually willing to risk their skins in whatever military adventure their government may currently be promoting.

Earlier I used to be scared of ghosts. Now, after having done so many paei films, I start thinking to myself 'Naaney Pei.'

In any open question, we should argue from what we do know to what we do not know. We do know that fervent legends and stubborn myths arise easily and naturally. We do not know that dead people rise from the grave.

The law against witches does not prove there be any; but it punishes the malice of those people that use such means to take away men's lives.

We didn't have any books at home. Not even children's books or fairy tales. The only 'fantastic' stories came from religion class. And I took them all very literally, that God sees everything, and so I felt I was always being watched. Or that dead people were in Heaven right over our village.

...belief has a second edge. If there are ten thousand medieval peasants who create vampires by believing them real, there may be one - probably a child - who will imagine the stake necessary to kill it. But a stake is only stupid wood; the mind is the mallet which drives it home.

A word is an arbitrary label - that's the foundation of linguistics. But many people think otherwise. They believe in word magic: that uttering a spell, incantation, curse, or prayer can change the world. Don't snicker: Would you ever say, 'Nothing has gone wrong yet' without looking for wood to knock?

The law against witches does not prove there be any; …

Where I grew up, in a remote village at the back of a valley, the old still thought the dead needed attending to - a notion so universal, it's enscribed in all religions. If you didn't, they might exact revenge upon the living.