#superstition

Speculation is perfectly all right, but if you stay there you've only founded a superstition. If you test it, you've started a science. ↗

— Hal Clement

#only #perfectly #right #science #speculation

Fables should be taught as fables, myths as myths, and miracles as poetic fantasies. To teach superstitions as truths is a most terrible thing. The child mind accepts and believes them, and only through great pain and perhaps tragedy can he be in after years relieved of them. ↗

— Hypatia

#after #believes #child #fables #fantasies

You never see animals going through the absurd and often horrible fooleries of magic and religion. . . . Only man behaves with such gratuitous folly. It is the price he has to pay for being intelligent but not, as yet, quite intelligent enough. ↗

— Aldous Huxley

#magic #religion #superstition #intelligence

For two nights Félicité never left the dead girl. She said the same prayers over and over again, sprinkled holy water on the sheets, then sat down again to watch. At the end of her first vigil, she noticed that the child's face had gone yellow, the lips were turning blue, the nose looked sharper, and the eyes were sunken. She kissed them several times, and would not have been particularly surprised if Virginie had opened them again: to minds like hers the supernatural is a simple matter. She laid her out, wrapped her in a shroud, put her in her coffin, placed a wreath on her, and spread out her hair. It was fair and amazingly long for her age. Félicité cut off a big lock, half of which she slipped into her bosom, resolving never to part with it. ↗

— Gustave Flaubert

#love #superstition #age

Every aspect of Nature reveals a deep mystery and touches our sense of wonder and awe. Theophrastus was right. Those afraid of the universe as it really is, those who pretend to nonexistent knowledge and envision a Cosmos centered on human beings will prefer the fleeting comforts of superstition. They avoid rather than confront the world. But those with the courage to explore the weave and structure of the Cosmos, even where it differs profoundly from their wishes and prejudices, will penetrate its deepest mysteries. ↗

— Carl Sagan

#knowledge #learning #mystery #nature #pretense

With their backs to the sunrise they worship the night. ↗

— Robert G. Ingersoll

#skepticism #superstition #religion

If superstition could contradict science, the world may as well be on the back of a turtle. But giving into turtle worship was a bridge too far. ↗

— Thomm Quackenbush

#religion #science #superstition #turtle #dreams

The problem is that one man's superstition is another man's religion, and vice versa. Many Protestants today still see Catholicism as being rife with superstition, ... while atheists and agnostics would see bien-pensant Protestants as worshiping an equally absurd form of the supernatural. ↗

— David Gibson

#superstition #equality

If you believed in Christianity or Islam it was called 'faith', but if you believed in astrology or friday the thirteenth it was Superstition! ↗

— Jostein Gaarder

#judgement #philosophy #society #superstition #faith

There is a fifth dimension, beyond that which is known to man. It is a dimension as vast as space and as timeless as infinity. It is the middle ground between light and shadow, between science and superstition. ↗

— Rod Serling

#beyond #dimension #fifth #ground #infinity