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It is bad luck to fall out of a thirteenth story window on Friday.
-Proverb
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We live in a time of twin credulities: the hunger for the miraculous combined with a servile awe of science. The mating of the two gives us superstition plus scientism.
-Edward Abbey
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The type of fig leaf which each culture employs to cover its social taboos offers a twofold description of its morality. It reveals that certain unacknowledged behavior exists and it suggests the form that such behavior takes.
-Freda Adler
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The general root of superstition is that men observe when things hit, and not when they miss; and commit to memory the one, and forget and pass over the other.
-Francis Bacon
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I have, thanks to my travels, added to my stock all the superstitions of other countries. I know them all now, and in any critical moment of my life, they all rise up in armed legions for or against me.
-Sarah Bernhardt
The Memoirs of Sarah Bernhardt, ch. 8, 1977 edition.
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Superstition is only the fear of belief, while religion is the confidence.
-Marguerite Blessington
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Superstition is the religion of feeble minds.
-Edmund Burke
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Superstition is an unreasoning fear of God.
-Marcus Tullius Cicero
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There is in superstition a senseless fear of God.
-Marcus Tullius Cicero
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When superstition is allowed to perform the task of old age in dulling the human temperament, we can say goodbye to all excellence in poetry, in painting, and in music.
-Denis Diderot
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Superstitions are habits rather than beliefs.
-Marlene Dietrich
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We may be through with the past, but the past is not through with us. Ideas of the Stone Age exist side by side with the latest scientific thought. Only a fraction of mankind has emerged from the Dark Ages, and in the most lucid brains, as Logan Pearsall Smith has said, we come upon nests of woolly caterpillars. Seemingly sane men entrust their wealth to stargazers and their health to witch doctors. Giant planes throb through the stratosphere, but half their passengers are wearing magic amulets and are protected from harm by voodoo incantations. Hotels boast of express elevators and a telephone in every room, but omit thirteen from all floor and room numbers lest their guests be ill at ease.
-Bergen Evans
The Natural History of Nonsense
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The superstition of science scoffs at the superstition of faith.
-James A. Froude
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Superstition is the poetry of life.
-Johann von Goethe
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Mankind are an incorrigible race. Give them but bugbears and idols -- it is all that they ask; the distinctions of right and wrong, of truth and falsehood, of good and evil, are worse than indifferent to them.
-William Hazlitt
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We find many things to which the prohibition of them constitutes the only temptation.
-William Hazlitt
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Superstition, bigotry and prejudice, ghosts though they are, cling tenaciously to life; they are shades armed with tooth and claw. They must be grappled with unceasingly, for it is a fateful part of human destiny that it is condemned to wage perpetual war against ghosts. A shade is not easily taken by the throat and destroyed.
-Victor Hugo
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It is the customary fate of new truths to begin as heresies and to end as superstitions.
-Thomas Henry Huxley
The Coming of Age, 1880
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Superstition is the only religion of which base souls are capable of.
-Joseph Joubert
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The worst superstition is to consider our own tolerable.
-Doris Lessing
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The superstition in which we grew up,
Though we may recognize it, does not lose
Its power over us--Not all are free
Who make mock of their chains.
-Gotthold Ephraim Lessing
Nathan the Wise, 1779
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I think the greatest taboos in America are faith and failure.
-Michael Malone
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It is bad luck to be superstitious.
-Andrew W. Mathis
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Whenever a taboo is broken, something good happens, something vitalizing. Taboos after all are only hangovers, the product of diseased minds, you might say, of fearsome people who hadn't the courage to live and who under the guise of morality and religion have imposed these things upon us.
-Henry Miller
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Where the flag of truth waves unfurled, there you will find superstition waiting in ambush.
-Platen
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Books about Superstition
