quotations about magic
Many secrets of art and nature are thought by the unlearned to be magical.
ROGER BACON
The Encyclopedia of Science Fiction
The magician must expect the exposure of his tricks sooner or later, and see what it has required long months of study and time to perfect dissolved in an hour. The very best illusions of the best magicians of a few years ago are now the common property of traveling showmen at country fairs.
ALEXANDER HERRMANN
Cosmopolitan, December 1892
There is no magic. There is only knowledge, more or less hidden.
GENE WOLFE
The Claw of the Conciliator
When magic creates man it may aspire to control him.
R. CASTLETON
attributed, Day's Collacon
When you're touched by magic, nothing's ever quite the same again. What really makes me sad is all those people who never have the chance to know that touch. They're too busy, or they just don't hold with make-believe, so they shut the door without really knowing it was there to be opened in the first place.
CHARLES DE LINT
What the Mouse Found and Other Stories
True Magic is the greatest of all natural sciences, because it includes a knowledge of visible and invisible nature. It is not only a science but an art, because it cannot be learned out of books and must be acquired by practical experience.
L. W. DE LAURENCE
Great Book of Magical Art
Magic is not done, it's not performed. Like any performance art, it withers away to nothing if it's not presented in the grand style. Moving your feet around is not dancing, reading the lyrics is not singing, and pulling a rabbit out of a hat is not magic.
JOHN CASSIDY & MICHAEL STROUD
The Klutz Book of Magic
First rule of magic: Don't let anyone know your real name. Names have power.
NEIL GAIMAN
The Books of Magic: The Invisible Labyrinth
There is magic, but you have to be the magician. You have to make the magic happen.
SIDNEY SHELDON
Are You Afraid of the Dark?
Where magic is concerned, there is always an initial decision, an initial willingness to let it enter your life. If that is not there neither is magic.
NEIL GAIMAN
The Books of Magic: The Road to Nowhere
Too much magic could wrap time and space around itself, and that wasn't good news for the kind of person who had grown used to things like effects following things like causes.
TERRY PRATCHETT
Sourcery
The old spelling MAGICK has been adopted throughout in order to distinguish the Science of the Magi from all its counterfeits.
ALEISTER CROWLEY
Magick Book IV
You either have the magic or you don't. There's no way you can work up to it.
FREDDY MERCURY
Circus Magazine, April 1975
Magic exists. Who can doubt it, when there are rainbows and wildflowers, the music of the wind and the silence of the stars? Anyone who has loved has been touched by magic. It is such a simple and such an extraordinary part of the lives we live.
NORA ROBERTS
Charmed
It is not so much by any power inherent in himself that the magician works, as by the ductility of that material of gaping credulity upon which he operates.
ROBERT BELL
The Ladder of Gold
Major magical artifacts are big business and valuable as hell. Even the express courier companies won't insure them for full value. They're just too likely to be stolen.
CAT ADAMS
The Eldritch Conspiracy
That's the thing with magic. You've got to know it's still here, all around us, or it just stays invisible for you.
CHARLES DE LINT
"Ghosts of Wind and Shadow", Dreams Underfoot: The Newford Collection
Like legend and myth, magic fades when it is unused.
CHARLES DE LINT
The Little Country
Magic is the ancestor of technology, the ancestor of what we call applied science. Medicine springs from it. The individual medicine man or Big Medicine among the aboriginal inhabitants of this continent was a man who, by reason of special ability and training, was able to do things that the ordinary individual could not do in the way of controlling mysterious forces of nature. The word "medicine" was applied not merely to what we call medicine, but to rain making, cloud making, wind making, getting strength into the war party, harming their enemies, etc. When we want anything done in what we call the arts of technology, we go to a special individual, e.g., physician, engineer, carpenter, plumber, who has a special training. The medicine man was a man technically trained and able to control mysterious forces. Of course, the ordinary member of the tribe as a hunter, fisher, etc., had his training, and he could do the ordinary things in the ordinary way. But if he wanted anything special done, he went to the medicine man--the Shaman.
JOSEPH ALEXANDER LEIGHTON
The Field of Philosophy
Ninety per cent of most magic merely consists of knowing one extra fact.
TERRY PRATCHETT
Night Watch