My Years of Magical Thinking Quotes

“Indeed, most magical systems can best be understood as alternative languages: the tarot, astrology, kabbalah, I Ching, and runes all provide a set of symbols that can be used to describe, model or articulate any phenomenon.”
― Lionel Snell, My Years of Magical Thinking

“We shall see that magic does not deny truth, it positively embraces truth as a crutch to assist belief, but it equall embraces falsehood - and that makes it unacceptable in scientific culture. Magic embraces goodness, but it also embraces evil - and that makes it disreputable in religious eyes. Magic embraces beauty and it also embraces ugliness - and that can make it seem kitsch or 'cheesy' in artistic eyes.”
― Lionel Snell, My Years of Magical Thinking

“Religion seeks to lift us from everyday matter towards spirit, while magic seeks rather to bring spirit down into everyday matter. While religion often reflects a 'quest for meaning', magic is more about 'sowing seeds of meaning'.”
― Lionel Snell, My Years of Magical Thinking

“Instant gratification is no more essential to magical culture than bigotry to religious culture or psychopathy to science, and yet times of magical revival do go hand in hand with a rise in individualism”
― Lionel Snell, My Years of Magical Thinking

“People who have absolute power tend to grow very fragile, because they have so little experience of not getting their own way and surviving that setback.”
― Lionel Snell, My Years of Magical Thinking

“Magical thinking is the brain's way of handling complexity and, judging by the survival or humankind, it has done a pretty good job.”
― Lionel Snell, My Years of Magical Thinking

“Religion and Science are paths of denial, in the sense that a scientific statement should be one capable of being disproved, while a religious statement should be capable of being disbelieved.”
― Lionel Snell, My Years of Magical Thinking

“Religious culture is the one that defines a game and sets the rules; Scientific culture is the one that tests the rules; Arts culture is the one that breaks the rules; and Magical culture is the one that plays by the rules, but knows it is "just a game".”
― Lionel Snell, My Years of Magical Thinking

“A distinction was drawn between the scientific use of language - where a word is chosen for the meaning it has - and the magical use of language for the meaning a word conveys or transports”
― Lionel Snell, My Years of Magical Thinking

“You can choose to play on any board or several games at once. The only limitation is the power of your imagination to hold so many truths in parallel.”
― Lionel Snell, My Years of Magical Thinking

“But it felt more like a social construct: a religious grouping based on the idea that it was fun to pretend that life was a game as a relief from the knowledge that actually
life was terribly serious.”
― Lionel Snell, My Years of Magical Thinking