The Magnus Archives Quotes

“Hello Jon, Apologies For The Deception.”
― Jonathan Sims, The Magnus Archives: Season 4

“Some of the smartest people there were also the most committed. Intelligence doesn’t make you less prone to taking on bad ideas, it just makes you better at defending them to other people and to yourself. Smart people can believe some truly ridiculous things, and then deploy all the reason and logic at their disposal to justify them, because a belief doesn’t begin in your mind. It begins in your feelings.”
― Jonathan Sims, The Magnus Archives: Season 4

“Free of what? We all have forces that drive us, circumstances that direct us, and even if we choose to ignore these and act against all logic, just to prove that we can – is that not simply allowing the existential terror of our own powerlessness to control us instead?”
― Jonathan Sims, The Magnus Archives: Season 4

“The more I listen, the more it seems to me we’re all just – groping about, trying desperately to find out what we’re actually meant to be doing.”
― Jonathan Sims, The Magnus Archives: Season 4

“There is nothing in the world more reassuring than ignorance, which we can mistake for certainty.”
― Jonathan Sims, The Magnus Archives: Season 4

“Bodies are strange. Rather glad they're not my concern anymore."
"Must be nice."
"It really is.”
― Jonathan Sims, The Magnus Archives: Season 4

“What good’s being alone if you don’t know how alone you truly are?”
― Jonathan Sims, The Magnus Archives: Season 4

“Right, well. If I’m just another cog, maybe I can’t leave the machine, but from this moment I’m not turning. I’m jammed.”
― Jonathan Sims, The Magnus Archives: Season 4

“Jumping on a grenade is only heroic if you weren’t the one who actually threw it.”
― Jonathan Sims, The Magnus Archives: Season 4

“Well, sometimes the helping people hurts.

Sure, but that doesn’t mean everything painful helps.”
― Jonathan Sims, The Magnus Archives: Season 4

“Nice to see Gertrude also used to get a lot of threats. So far, it doesn’t seem that any of them went desperately well, except for Elias, of course, but he didn’t threaten, did he, just...did it.”
― Jonathan Sims, The Magnus Archives: Season 4

“Everyone thinks they’re too smart to get involved in a cult. I’m sure you do.
You think that, of the first mention of aliens, or the end of the world, or the lost book of the Bible where Jesus buried his holy staff in the foothills of the Himalayas, you’d go running.
Trouble is, that misunderstands how it works”
― Jonathan Sims, The Magnus Archives: Season 4

“After all, the larger the space you find yourself alone in, the more isolated you feel.
And being aware of how lonely you are (dry laugh) can make anywhere feel more empty.”
― Jonathan Sims, The Magnus Archives: Season 4

“The only reason this one feels special is because it's happening to you”
― Jonathan Sims, The Magnus Archives: Season 4

“Do you have any idea how much damage you can do if you’re a police officer who wants to hurt people? How much the system will protect you?”
― Jonathan Sims, The Magnus Archives: Season 4

“My family were blandly supportive to the point of uselessness. Oh, they had plenty of soothing platitudes, but platitudes wouldn’t get me back 20 years.”
― Jonathan Sims, The Magnus Archives: Season 4

“Cults are very good at finding you when you’re at your lowest point, when you’re your most emotionally vulnerable. And when you’re at that point it’s astounding what can crawl into your heart and start to fester there.”
― Jonathan Sims, The Magnus Archives: Season 4

“Is that your first question?
…is there a limit?
Only until I get bored. And that does tend to come more quickly these days.”
― Jonathan Sims, The Magnus Archives: Season 4

“We do spend a lot of time together. It’s not that easy though. When everyone has so many walls, so many defenses, sometimes you can feel lonely even when you’re all in the same room. But it’s better than the alternative and at least none of us are suffering alone.”
― Jonathan Sims, The Magnus Archives: Season 4

“Doesn’t even need to tell you any lies – just waits for the lies you tell yourself.”
― Jonathan Sims, The Magnus Archives: Season 4

“Maybe. Look, life forces you to make hard decisions, but I can never trust someone who goes around looking for hard decisions to make.”
― Jonathan Sims, The Magnus Archives: Season 4

“It’s easy to pass judgment from the outside.

One more reason to stay on the outside and watch.”
― Jonathan Sims, The Magnus Archives: Season 4

“Sometimes people have problems that will wreck you long before you can make a dent in them, and some people don’t want help, they just want other people suffering with them.”
― Jonathan Sims, The Magnus Archives: Season 4

“ I have always believed that the key to manipulating people is to ensure that they always under- or over-estimate you. Never reveal your true abilities or plans.”
― Jonathan Sims, The Magnus Archives: Season 4

“Hm. Have you ever read War and Peace, John? I know, I know; I had to read an extract for a literature class once, ended up reading the whole thing
It’s not actually as boring as people say, and its central thesis is that the tiniest, most insignificant factors can control the destiny of the world.
In its post-script, Tolstoy muses on the concept of free will, on whether or not he really believes in it. He ultimately decides that if all the millions upon millions of factors that weigh upon our choices were fully and completely known, then all could be foreseen and predetermined.

But, he argues, it is quite impossible for the human mind to comprehend even a fraction of these. And in that vast, dark space of ignorance lies: free will.
Isn’t that marvelous, John? Free will is simply ignorance. It’s just the name we give to the fact that no one can ever really see everything that controls them.
Of course, that’s not the real crux of the free will question that’s bothering you at the moment, is it? I think that one probably comes down to whether or not you’re choosing to continue reading this statement out loud.”
― Jonathan Sims, The Magnus Archives: Season 4

“Scans show decisions are made by your brain long before your conscious mind even has a chance to register them. Most of one’s life is simply spent looking back and convincing yourself that you chose deliberately to act like you did.”
― Jonathan Sims, The Magnus Archives: Season 4

“I was… so sure I’d find something up there. But instead it was just another broken person trying to come to terms with the wreckage of their life.”
― Jonathan Sims, The Magnus Archives: Season 4

“These things that – loom so large over our lives trap us and push us and – sometimes kill us. But they never actually tell us what we’re supposed to be doing. So we scheme and we plot, lash out at each other without ever really knowing why.”
― Jonathan Sims, The Magnus Archives: Season 4