SUPERSTITION

Related Subjects: Belief, Fairies, Ghosts, Gods and Goddesses, Ignorance, Imagination, Miracle, Mystery, Mythology, Oracle, Witch

1. There is a superstition in avoiding superstition, when men think they do best if they go farthest from the superstition,—by which means they often take away the good as well as the bad.—BACON
   

2. The master of superstition is the people, and in all superstition wise men follow fools.—BACON
   

3. As it addeth deformity to an ape to be so like a man, so the similitude of superstition to religion makes it the more deformed.—BACON
   

4. Open biographical volumes wherever you please, and the man who has no faith in religion is the one who hath faith in a nightmare and ghosts.—BULWER-LYTTON
   

5. Superstition is a senseless fear of God; religion the intelligent and pious worship of the deity.—CICERO
   

6. Superstitions are, for'the most part, but the shadows of great truths.—TRYON EDWARDS
   

7. Superstition is the poetry of life. It is inherent in man's nature; and when we think it is wholly eradicated, it fakes refuge in the strangest holes and corners, whence it peeps out all at once, as soon as it can do it with safety.—GOETHE
   

8. We are all tattooed in our cradles with the beliefs of our tribe; the record may seem superficial, but it is indelible. You cannot educate a man wholly out of the superstitious fears which were implanted in his imagination, no matter how utterly his reason may reject them.—O. W. HOLMES
   

9. That the corruption of the best thing produces the worst, is grown into a maxim, and is commonly proved, among other instances, by the pernicious effects of superstition and enthusiasm, the corruptions of true religion.—DAVID HUME
   

10. Superstition is the only religion of which base souls are capable.—JOUBERT, Pensees
    

11. Liberal minds are open to conviction. Liberal doctrines are capable of improvement. There are proselytes from atheism; but none from superstition.—JUNIUS
    

12. Superstition always inspires bitterness; religion, grandeur of mind. The superstitious man raises beings inferior to himself to deities.—LAVATER
    

13. The greatest burden in the world is superstition, not only of ceremonies in the church, but of imaginary and scarecrow sins at home.—MILTON
    

14. I am at a loss to know whether it be my hare's foot which is my preservative, or my taking of a pill of turpentine every morning.—SAMUEL PEPYS, Diary
    

15. Why is it that we entertain the belief that for every purpose odd numbers are the most effectual?—PLINY THE ELDER, Natural History
    

16. Religion worships God, while superstition profanes that worship.—SENECA
    

17. But in the gross and scope of my opinion,
    This bodes some strange eruption to our state.—SHAKESPEARE, Hamlet
    

18. And oftentimes, to win us to our harm,
    The instruments of darkness tell us truths,
    Win us with honest trifles, top betray's
    In deepest consequence.—SHAKESPEARE, Macbeth
    

19. The child taught to believe any occurrence a good or evil omen, or any day of the week lucky, hath a wide inroad made upon the soundness of his understanding.—ISAAC WATTS