Magical Thinking Quotes

“Although I was able to maintain a pleasant expression, I was mentally throwing up in her face.”
― Augusten Burroughs

“Escape from reality. In some instances, dissociation induces people to imagine that they have some kind of mastery over intractable environmental difficulties. Dissociation is often implicated in magical thinking or self-induced trance states. This aspect of dissociation is frequently found in abuse survivors. It is not uncommon for abused children to engage in magical thinking to retain an illusion of control over the situation (e.g., believing that they "cause" the perpetrator to act out).”
― Marlene Steinberg

“Enlightenment humanism, then, is far from being a crowd-pleaser. The idea that the ultimate good is to use knowledge to enhance human welfare leaves people cold. Deep explanations of the universe, the planet, life, the brain? Unless they use magic, we don't want to believe them! Saving the lives of billions, eradicating disease, feeding the hungry? Bo-ring. People extending their compassion to all of humankind? Not good enough—we want the laws of physics to care about us! Longevity, health, understanding, beauty, freedom, love? There's got to be more to life than that!”
― Steven Pinker, Enlightenment Now: The Case for Reason, Science, Humanism, and Progress

“...ultimately, all diseases are magical diseases...

("Gas Station Carnival")”
― Thomas Ligotti, The Nightmare Factory

“Too many people confuse real magic with magical thinking. Real magic isn't a trick and it transforms our lives. Magical thinking is denial.
Real magic is what happens when we break old belief patterns and have the courage to employ the native laws of the Universe”
― Jacob Nordby

“She believed in magic—the magic of places, the magic of people, the magic of coincidences, serendipity, and fortune. She enjoyed wandering through the world with the open mind and curiosity of a four-year-old child. In her world the mystical, mythical, and magical inhabited the same space and time as the ordinary and the practical. At Bethesda Terrace, she always felt close to a source of magic and creativity. It was as if she was tapping into the place where dragons, angels, gods, sorceresses, and demons came to life.”
― Jamie Le Fay, Beginnings

“The world is entirely magical, the only illusion is that it isn't...”
― Lydia Andal, Marilyn Monroe, Under the Veil; Autism, Numerology & Norma Jeane

“The sky is scrubbed fresh and stark blue by the gone rain, but every trace of that water has evaporated from the earth around them. It feels like a dream, all that rainfall. 'This is a cycle,' she thinks. Every day a fresh horror, and when it's over, this feeling of surreal detachment. A disbelief, almost, in what they just endured. The mind is magical. Human beings are magical.”
― Jeanine Cummins, American Dirt

“In supernatural horror stories, however, magical thinking is a completely different matter. Those characters contending with what seems to be the work of magic will deny till the very last moment that anything magical is going on. They will invoke reason and evidence and eek out corroborations for the cause of their problems. But readers of these stories are rarely, if ever, on the side of these characters. They desperately want to believe that there is indeed something magical going on and they are primed to accept it whenever it occurs. Some readers especially enjoy a story with bad magic, as it assures them that magic is confined to fiction and will not leak into their real lives. This is the most perverse form of magical thinking and the one least likely to be recognized as such.”
― Thomas Ligotti, The Nightmare Factory, Vol. 2

“We should be cautiously open to the spiritual and non-rational, and skeptical of the more invisible magical thinking—what we might call “magical reason”—pervading secular thought and experience in modern society. Science and technology are for most people a new religion, and their orthodoxies are believed with the same fervor.”
― David Watson, Against the Megamachine: Essays on Empire & Its Enemies

“It is possible to induce incorrect notions of cause and effect in most people in just a few minutes. All that is necessary is to expose them to rewards which they believe they are generating based on their actions when in fact the rewards are randomly awarded. People will latch onto any seeming success and repeat it, even when they have to explain repeated failures as well. It appears practically impossible, or at least very rare, for humans not to be influenced by immediate experiences of concrete results. This is true even if the experiences turn out to have limited theoretical validity. The moment of surprise is not when people repeat alchemical failures but when they begin to do something else.”
― Naomi janowitz, Magic in the Roman World

“If I shut everything else out and filled the room with memories, the past could become the present, and I could live there, with him. I would never leave.”
― Suzanne Hayes, I'll Be Seeing You

“Je me redisais en étouffant mes sanglots les mots où Gilberte avait laissé éclater sa joie de ne pas venir de longtemps aux Champs-Élysées. Mais déjà le charme dont, par son simple fonctionnement, se remplissait mon esprit dès qu'il songeait à elle, la position particulière, unique,—fût elle affligeante,—où me plaçait inévitablement par rapport à Gilberte, la contrainte interne d'un pli mental, avaient commencé à ajouter, même à cette marque d'indifférence, quelque chose de romanesque, et au milieu de mes larmes se formait un sourire qui n'était que l'ébauche timide d'un baiser. Et quand vint l'heure du courrier, je me dis ce soir-là comme tous les autres: Je vais recevoir une lettre de Gilberte, elle va me dire enfin qu'elle n'a jamais cessé de m'aimer, et m'expliquera la raison mystérieuse pour laquelle elle a été forcée de me le cacher jusqu'ici, de faire semblant de pouvoir être heureuse sans me voir, la raison pour laquelle elle a pris l'apparence de la Gilberte simple camarade.
Tous les soirs je me plaisais à imaginer cette lettre, je croyais la lire, je m'en récitais chaque phrase. Tout d'un coup je m'arrêtais effrayé. Je comprenais que si je devais recevoir une lettre de Gilberte, ce ne pourrait pas en tous cas être celle-là puisque c'était moi qui venais de la composer. Et dès lors, je m'efforçais de détourner ma pensée des mots que j'aurais aimé qu'elle m'écrivît, par peur en les énonçant, d'exclure justement ceux-là,—les plus chers, les plus désirés—, du champ des réalisations possibles. Même si par une invraisemblable coïncidence, c'eût été justement la lettre que j'avais inventée que de son côté m'eût adressée Gilberte, y reconnaissant mon œuvre je n'eusse pas eu l'impression de recevoir quelque chose qui ne vînt pas de moi, quelque chose de réel, de nouveau, un bonheur extérieur à mon esprit, indépendant de ma volonté, vraiment donné par l'amour.”
― Marcel Proust

“Maybe this was the moment when I knew I was part of a long line of almost erased stories. A child of denial. Of magical thinking.”
― Jacqueline Woodson, Red at the Bone

“Everything and everyone was so hungry. The monster. The Barrow folk, buying everything up when danger lurked. The City people, clutching at pretty little enchanted things. Substituting magic for people. The shining people’s ancestors, when the plague threatened, ignoring the warnings of the wizards, assuring themselves magic would keep them safe as they themselves brought death upon the entire island.”
― Anne Ursu, The Real Boy

“Transforming your life does not require extraordinary luck, magic or miracles. You can b begin to change your life at any moment by simply changing your attitude.”
― Anthon St. Maarten

“We talk about magic as if it's something unnatural and awesome but that's only because we think ourselves basic and mundane. Meanwhile, we are well-formed dirt that's conscious and communicates with languages that can be whatever we want them to be. We fly in the skies on metal birds and discover deep seas inside of iron whales. Think of all the barren planets in our solar system: nothing but balls of different kinds of dirt and rock and ice; and yet, here we are! We are anomalies, we are magical. If we identified this in ourselves; all the magic in the world would be but an extension of our anomalous existence.”
― C. JoyBell C.

“I nodded sagely, pretended to be making some sort of useful observation of the white surfaces and clear tubes and gray machines that I lacked the doctorates to comprehend, and thought about dualism. Good and evil. Man and woman. All forces and powers and principalities equal and opposite. The notion that we live in a universe with that kind of comforting, obvious ledger. That is the kind of thinking that makes people believe that the moon controls menstrual cycles, that vaginas are magic, when all they really are is blood and tissue and, in the instance of one particularly ugly case that I drink to forget about, teeth. They're impressively versatile and under the right circumstances a lot of fun, but no more or less miraculous than your twenty-ninth vertebra.”
― Phillip Andrew Bennett Low, Monsters in a Mirror: Strange Tales from the Chapel Perilous

“For the most part Communists were victims of magical thinking, according to which an impure source contaminates the information that comes from it. Anyone who was a political enemy on fundamental issues must automatically be wrong on particular or factual questions.”
― Leszek Kołakowski, Main Currents Of Marxism: The Founders, The Golden Age, The Breakdown

“Every day is a gift
Every day is precious
Every day counts
Every day is filled with magic moments

At the end of the day
let go of all ill feelings
and all ill thoughts.
Release and let go
and be free of them.”
― Hazel Butterworth

“Most of us, it seems, have a strong inclination to accept the peculiarities of our social environment as if they were ‘natural’.

It is one of the characteristics of the magical attitude of a primitive tribal or ‘closed’ society that it lives in a charmed circle of unchanging taboos, of laws and customs which are felt to be as inevitable as the rising of the sun, or the cycle of the seasons, or similar obvious regularities of nature. And it is only after this magical ‘closed society’ has actually broken down that a theoretical understanding of the difference between ‘nature’ and ‘society’ can develop.”
― Karl Popper, The Open Society and Its Enemies - Volume One: The Spell of Plato

“I can smell Runu-Didi on her clothes and her pillow that has acquired a dip in the middle from the weight of her head. If I stare at it long enough, the snatcher or the bad djinn who has caught Didi will let her go. I stare and stare. My eyes hurt, but I don't look away.”
― Deepa Anappara, Djinn Patrol on the Purple Line

“I like distributed systems. If just one person truly believes in the existence of something imaginary, he's an idiot. But when thousands of people even slightly believe, you get beautifully painted eggs hidden under bushes and quarters exchanged for loose teeth under your pillow.  You get Elvis presiding at weddings and cookie crumbs on the plate left for Santa each Christmas morning.”
― Raymond St. Elmo, The Origin of Birds in the Footprints of Writing

“Magical realism is a rain of flowers falling during a funeral, no one asking why. It is finding a dull reference to a non-existent country in an old encyclopedia, and then finding an explanation which leads to a further secret deeper in. It's a bridge bursting into fire after you cross. In pure form it is never explained, which means that just possibly it is not even unnatural.”
― Raymond St. Elmo, The Origin of Birds in the Footprints of Writing

“There is a way of thinking that is a kind of madness. You look for signs and meaning in clouds and leaves and cards and license plates. And you find it, almost. The revelation is just a little past your reach, leading you on till you are trading secrets with a stranger in the elevator or a tree in the park. That is Magic Thinking. But Magic Realism says, ‘suppose it is true, just for a day, just for a page.’ The weird and magical happens, unexplained, turning everyday life into a mystery.”
― Raymond St. Elmo, The Origin of Birds in the Footprints of Writing

“Art supersedes knowledge written in books.
Art is the muse.
Art is magic settling upon your he[art] like dust.”
― Michael Bassey Johnson, Night of a Thousand Thoughts

“Você pode não acreditar em magia, mas algo muito estranho está acontecendo neste exato momento. Sua cabeça se dissolveu no ar e posso ver os rododendros através da sua barriga. Não é que você esteja morto, nem nada dramático assim, é que você está simplesmente desaparecendo e eu nem consigo lembrar o seu nome.”
― Leonora Carrington, The Hearing Trumpet

“It seems to me that it perpetuates itself, this exchange of nothing. Behind it is an existential exhaustion, the sickness, the fear, the lockdowns, the stretching of the human mind past its capacity to manage. We have been running on empty for so long that we've lost the urge to refuel. We have spent so long anxiously scanning the news that we are now in a fixed state of objectless checking. This is our reading matter now. We are not looking for anything, we are just looking. It seems that if we stop looking, something terrible could happen. Looking is our magical thinking. It used to feel protective, but now it's turned dark. Now, if we don't check, if we don't perpetually look over our shoulder, we suspect we might bring about disaster. The last thing propping up the sky is our eternal vigilance.”
― Katherine May, Enchantment: Awakening Wonder in an Anxious Age

“It was a cold-blooded lie that a god had lovingly made the world and set out the sun and moon as lights to land dwellers, that brothers had fought, that one of the races was saved, the other cursed. Yet he, the old Shaper, might make it true, by the sweetness of his harp, his cunning trickery. It came to me with a fierce jolt that I wanted it.”
― John Gardner, Grendel

“La ciencia es más que un cuerpo de conocimiento, es una manera de pensar. Tengo un presagio de la época de mis hijos o mis nietos, cuando Estados Unidos sea una economía de servicios e información; cuando casi todas las principales industrias manufactureras se hayan ido a otros países; cuando los increíbles poderes tecnológicos estén en manos de muy pocos, y nadie que represente el interés público pueda si quiera comprender los problemas; cuando la gente haya perdido la capacidad de establecer sus propias agendas o cuestionar sabiamente a los que tienen autoridad; cuando, abrazados a nuestras bolas de cristal y consultando nerviosamente nuestros horóscopos, con nuestras facultades críticas en declive, incapaces de distinguir entre lo que se siente bien y lo que es verdad, nos deslicemos de vuelta, casi sin darnos cuenta, en la superstición y la oscuridad. La caída en la estupidez de Norteamérica se hace evidente principalmente en la lenta decadencia del contenido de los medios de comunicación, de enorme influencia, las cuñas de sonido de treinta segundos (ahora reducidas a diez o menos), la programación de nivel ínfimo, las crédulas presentaciones de pseudociencia y superstición, pero sobre todo en una especie de celebración de la ignorancia.”
― Carl Sagan, The Demon-Haunted World: Science as a Candle in the Dark