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Magic — news, coverage & facts — IJR

Notable quotes

“Any sufficiently advanced magic is indistinguishable from technology.”
— Anonymous saying, this is an inversion of the third of Arthur C. Clarke's three laws : "Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic." It has been called "Niven's Law" and attributed to Larry Niven by some, and to Terry Pratchett by others, but without any citation of an original source in either case, and the earliest occurrence yet located is in Keystone Folklore (1984) by the Pennsylvania Folklore Society.
“I believe in the magic and authority of words.”
— René Char, in a message as a member of the French resistance, to his superiors in London, insisting that certain codewords "The library is on fire" be changed after a disastrous parachute drop which set a forest on fire and alerted the Gestapo to the location of his group of Maquis fighters, as quoted in René Char : This Smoke That Carried Us : Selected Poems (2004) edited by Susanne Dubroff
“I still believe poetry is a kind of magic.”
— Edward Field, in A Frieze for a Temple of Love (1998), p. 201
“All energy is the same, through its different states and names. Movement creates heat which is also light that waves like sound which tightens or loosens the atomic bonds of crystal as they hum with strong and weak forces. In mirroring resonance with all of this is magic, the radiant emission of life and death.”
— N. K. Jemisin, The Stone Sky (2017) p. 97
“There is real magic in enthusiasm. It spells the difference between mediocrity and accomplishment. … It gives warmth and good feeling to all your personal relationships.”
— Norman Vincent Peale, as quoted in Spiritual Literacy : Reading the Sacred in Everyday Life (1998) by Frederic Brussat and Mary Ann Brussat
“Formerly, when religion was strong and science weak, men mistook magic for medicine; now, when science is strong and religion weak, men mistake medicine for magic.”
— Thomas Szasz, in The Second Sin‎ (1973), "Science and Scientism", p. 115

Quotes via Wikiquote (CC BY-SA), each with its original source.