Top 100 Old Superstition Sayings
#1. The intellectual advancement of man depends on how often he can exchange an old superstition for a new truth.
Robert Green Ingersoll
#2. I would not exchange my freedom from old superstition, if I were to be burned at the stake next month, for all the peace and quiet of orthodoxy, if I must take the orthodoxy with peace and quiet.
Harriet Martineau
#3. The gods, so says the old superstition, do not like to behold too happy mortals. It is certain, at least, that some human beings do not.
L.M. Montgomery
#4. The general root of superstition : namely, 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
#5. The battle for evolution seems never-ending. And the battle is part of a wider war, a war between rationality and superstition.
Jerry A. Coyne
#6. I had a bunch of different colored hats I wore. When I started wearing a pink one, we won five or six tournaments in a row, so I stuck with it. It started as superstition and now it's tradition-my hideous trademark that I always wear.
Karch Kiraly
#7. Superstition is related to this life, religion to the next; superstition is allied to fatality, religion to virtue; it is by the vivacity of earthly desires that we become superstitious; it is, on the contrary, by the sacrifice of these desires that we become religious.
Madame De Stael
#8. Groundless superstition ill befits an army; valor is the only deity that rules in the warrior's breast.
Silius Italicus
#9. The foundation of our Empire was not laid in the gloomy age of Ignorance and Superstition, but at an Epoch when the rights of mankind were better understood and more clearly defined, than at any former period.
George Washington
#10. Superstition needs no grounding in truth, but once rooted, it grows a strong though twisted tree.
Terry Goodkind
#12. Before man can be free, and equal, and truly wise, he must cast aside the chains of habit and superstition; he must strip sensuality of its pomp, and selfishness of its excuses, and contemplate actions and objects as they really are.
Percy Bysshe Shelley
#14. Both Miss Lavinia and Miss Clarissa had a superstition, however, that he would have declared his passion, if he had not been cut short in his youth (at about sixty) by over-drinking his constitution, and over-doing an attempt to set it right again by swilling Bath water.
Charles Dickens
#15. Superstition is the religion of feeble minds.
Edmund Blake
#16. In paganism light is mixed with darkness, and religion and truth are blended with superstition and error.
Lindley Murray
#17. When the human race has once acquired a superstition, nothing short of death is ever likely to remove it.
Mark Twain
#18. Science stands for rational thought, faith for superstition and unreason.
Deepak Chopra
#19. People think that epilepsy is divine simply because they don't have any idea what causes epilepsy. But I believe that someday we will understand what causes epilepsy, and at that moment, we will cease to believe that it's divine. And so it is with everything in the universe
Hippocrates
#20. Petronius was surely right in saying Fear made the gods. In primitive times fear of the unknown was normal; gratitude to an unknown was impossible.
J.M. Robertson
#21. ... Science... denude(s) all religious beliefs... denigrating them as irrational forms of superstition or myth regardless of their intrinsic rationality or value.
Nicholas Gane
#22. As manuals for contemplative understanding, the Bible and the Koran are worse than useless. Whatever wisdom can be found in their pages is never best found there, and it is subverted, time and again, by ancient savagery and superstition.
Sam Harris
#23. What is any religion? A little ritual, a little superstition, and some magic. It's not a strictly spiritual affair; it has psychological roles to fulfill. You might not want it to be a religion based on your own experience but that's like wanting to clean up your dreams
Gary Snyder
#24. Which, in morals, leads away from superstition, Which, in politics, leads away from government, and Which, in art, leads away from Tradition.
Various
#25. [Josiah P. Mendum memorial at Paine Hall]
[He turned] the strait-laced Boston of sixty years ago [into] the enlightened Hub of today, ... to 'destroy bigotry and uproot the evils of superstition.
Josiah P. Mendum
#26. You don't have to be a believer in a lot of superstition and nonsense - there's a difference between thinking to oneself and thinking as a form of conversation, even if there are no answers.
Nadine Gordimer
#27. I have a superstition that if I talk about plot, it's like letting sand out of a hole in the bottom of a bag.
Shirley Hazzard
#28. Mathematical Knowledge adds a manly Vigour to the Mind, frees it from Prejudice, Credulity, and Superstition.
John Arbuthnot
#29. Often, superstition and injustice are imposed by the same ecclesiastical and secular authorities, working hand in glove. It is no surprise that political revolutions, scepticism about religion, and the rise of science might go together,
Carl Sagan
#31. The greatest superstition now entertained by public men is that hypocrisy is the royal road to success.
Robert Green Ingersoll
#32. 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
#33. Superstition is just another form of thought like any other, a form that accentuates and regulates the association of ideas, it's an exacerbation, an illness, but, in fact, all thought is sickness, which is why no one ever thinks too much, at least most people do their best not to.
Javier Marias
#34. Superstition requires no tests, no measurements, no proof: just faith.
Mike A. Lancaster
#35. Ignorance fears all things, falling, terror-stricken before the passing wind. Superstition stands as the monument to ignorance, and before it kneel all who realize their own weakness who see in all things the strength they do not possess
Manly P. Hall
#36. Superstition is a part of the very being of humanity; and when we fancy that we are banishing it altogether, it takes refuge in the strangest nooks and corners, and then suddenly comes forth again, as soon as it believes itself at all safe.
Johann Wolfgang Von Goethe
#37. From a historical viewpoint, religion is just a kind of superstition, and from a political viewpoint it is a tool of social control.
Mario Bunge
#38. Science is history arranged according to the superstition and taste of the moment. The vocabulary of scholars has no wit, no salt. These heavy tomes have no soul, they are filled with distress ...
Blaise Cendrars
#39. It's never pleasant to have one's unquestioning beliefs put in their historical context, as I know from experience, I can assure you.
Kingsley Amis
#40. Superstition sets the whole world in flames, but philosophy douses them.
Voltaire
#41. I would rather dwell in the dim fog of superstition than in air rarefied to nothing by the air-pump of unbelief-in which the panting breast expires, vainly and convulsively gasping for breath.
Jean Paul
#42. Always obey your parents. When they are present. This is the best policy in the long run. Because if you don't, they will make you. Most parents think they know better than you do, and you can generally make more by humoring that superstition than you can by acting on your own better judgment.
Mark Twain
#43. Ignorance and superstition ever bear a close and mathematical relation to each other.
James F. Cooper
#44. Superstition and sensation are always so much more appealing than truth and rationality. The
Diana Gabaldon
#45. [The Catholic convent] had been like the Valley of the Shadow of Death, and there are white scars on my soul, where ignorance and superstition burnt me with their hell fire in those stifling days.
Voltairine De Cleyre
#46. Becoming rational is really simple task,all that you want to do is staying in central of superstition and immature criticizes
Myself
#47. Superstition is foolish, childish, primitive and irrational, but how much does it cost you to knock on wood?
Judith Viorst
#48. Lies don't make you happy. They just make you lie about being happy.
Stefan Molyneux
#49. You know, how people say it's good luck if a bird shits on you? and people believe it! i just want to grab them and say, 'dude, don't you realize this whole superstition was made up because no one could think of anything else good to say to a person who'd just been shit upon?
David Levithan
#50. India's a fascinating country. It's constantly changing, but there's still a lot of superstition and backwards thinking.
Lillete Dubey
#51. This is indeed a clash of civilisations, not between Islam and Christendom but between reason and superstition.
Polly Toynbee
#52. Our civilization ... is not devaluing its awareness of the unknowable; nor is it deifying it. It is the first civilization that has severed it from religion and superstition. In order to question it.
Andre Malraux
#53. It was a superstition among them that a lover who smoked would always return, even from France. A man's sexual capacity might be injured by smoking, but they would always prefer a faithful to a potent lover.
Graham Greene
#54. If there is a god maybe it rewards those who don't believe on the basis of insufficient evidence
and punishes those who do.
Peter Boghossian
#55. There i was in late middle age, cut loose in a thoroughly looted, bankrupt nation whose assets had been sold off to foreigners, a nation swamped by unchecked plagues and superstition and illiteracy and hypnotic tv, with virtually no health services for the poor. where to go? what to do?
Kurt Vonnegut
#56. A faith pure and simple distinguishes itself from superstition as a flame from the smoke and music from noise.
Jose Rizal
#57. Why is it that showers and even storms seem to come by chance, so that many people think it quite natural to pray for rain or fine weather, though they would consider it ridiculous to ask for an eclipse by prayer?
Henri Poincare
#58. The devil divides the world between atheism and superstition.
George Herbert
#59. They that are against superstition oftentimes run into it of the wrong side. If I wear all colors but black, then I am superstitious in not wearing black.
John Selden
#60. Real life is about accepting ups and downs, the good and the bad, the possibility of failure as well as the ambition to succeed. Atheism speaks to the truth about our human nature because it recognizes all this and does not seek to shield us from the truth by myth and superstition
Julian Baggini
#61. Spilled blood and superstition are the basis of the world. Man is not the only creature who kills for bread, or love, or power, because animals in the jungle do that in various ways, but he is the only creature who kills because of faith.
Hassan Blasim
#62. We may be living in the twentieth century, in resplendent sophistication. But deep down, most of us find ourselves still in the Stone Age of superstition.
Helen Hayes
#63. Superstition is only the fear of belief, while religion is the confidence.
Marguerite Gardiner
#64. I have only one superstition. I touch all the bases when I hit a home run. -Babe Ruth
Babe Ruth
#65. Fear has always been a diminisher of life. Whether bred in the bogs of superstition or clothed in the brocades of dogma and ritual, the specter of death has reduced the living to supplicants, powerless.
Marya Mannes
#66. That it is a solecism to begin a sentence with 'and' is a faintly lingering superstition. The OED gives examples ranging from the 10th to the 19th c.; the Bible is full of them.
Ernest Gowers
#67. I'm a third done into a new book but sorry - I have a superstition about talking about it!
Joanna Trollope
#68. Organized religion, being founded on superstition, is, perforce, not scientific. And all that which is not scientific - that is, truthful - must be bolstered up by force, fear and falsehood. Thus we always find slavery and organized religion going hand in hand.
Elbert Hubbard
#69. It's a rotten world, Miss Millick,' said Mr. Wran, talking at the window. 'Fit for another morbid growth of superstition. It's time the ghosts, or whatever you call them, took over and began a rule of fear, They'd be no worse than men.' ("Smoke Ghost")
Fritz Leiber
#70. It is impossible to wait and weigh, in golden scales, the sentiments of prejudice and superstition that have gathered round the priests who are considered to be the custodians of Hinduism.
Mahatma Gandhi
#71. Superstition is believing that something means anything and that anything means something and that each thing means a particular thing and will mean a particular thing is coming. Oh yes it does.
Gertrude Stein
#72. You'll find superstition a contagious thing. Some people let it get the better of them.
Curt Siodmak
#73. We teach people in order to open up their minds and release their captive powers. But we cannot predict the result. Freedom - we free their minds from superstition. We give the people the keys of the future to act therein as they wish.
Tayeb Salih
#74. A superstition is a premature explanation that overstays its time.
George Iles
#75. It seemed to them dreadfully dangerous to put it into words like that, for lately the things they didn't want to happen were the things that happened and the logic of this was that if you pretended not to want what you really wanted dreadfully you would be more likely to get it.
Elizabeth Goudge
#76. You'll almost encounter a superstition amongst musicians, people sort of go through strange rituals, what they need to do to write a song.
Dar Williams
#77. (On belief in miracles) - The gazing populace receive greedily, without examination, whatever soothes superstition and promotes wonder.
David Hume
#78. You believe in a book that has talking animals, wizards, witches, demons, sticks turning into snakes, food falling from the sky, people walking on water, and all sorts of magical, absurd and primitive stories, and you say that we are the ones that need help?
Dan Barker
#79. Repentance, however difficult to be practiced, is, if it be explained without superstition, easily understood. Repentance is the relinquishment of any practice from the conviction that it has offended God.
Samuel Johnson
#80. Does a man of sense run after every silly tale of hobgoblins or fairies, and canvass particularly the evidence? I never knew anyone, that examined and deliberated about nonsense who did not believe it before the end of his enquiries.
David Hume
#81. Punishment [by Nero] was inflicted on the Christians, a class of men given to a new and mischievous superstition.
Suetonius
#82. Management means, in the last analysis, the substitution of thought for brawn and muscle, of knowledge for folkways and superstition, and of cooperation for force. It means the substitution of responsibility for obedience to rank, and of authority of performance for the authority of rank.
Peter Drucker
#83. What is it you most dislike? Stupidity, especially in its nastiest forms of racism and superstition.
Christopher Hitchens
#84. Superstition, idolatry, and hypocrisy have ample wages, but truth goes a begging.
Martin Luther
#85. Once we make our decision, all things will come to us. Auspicious signs are not a superstition, but a confirmation. They are a response.
Ming-Dao Deng
#86. Fear has been the original parent of superstition, every new calamity urges trembling mortals to deprecate the wrath of invisible enemies
Edward Gibbon
#87. Go forth, little book, to destroy fear, prejudice and superstition, and help to install Reason in the minds of the human race to be its guide in the affairs of life and its living.
Joseph Lewis
#88. The greatest impact of the Darwinian revolution...was that it completed the liberation from superstition and fear that began in the physical sciences a few centuries before. Man, too, is a natural phenomenon. [in "The evolutionary concept of man", 1972, p. 35.]
George Gaylord Simpson
#89. Astronomy was born of superstition; eloquence of ambition, hatred, falsehood, and flattery; geometry of avarice; physics of an idle curiosity; and even moral philosophy of human pride. Thus the arts and sciences owe their birth to our vices.
Jean-Baptiste Rousseau
#90. In the absence of evidence, superstition. It's a Middle Ages thing. That's my theory anyway.
Tucker Carlson
#91. Heart-chilling superstition! thou canst glaze even Pity's eye with her own frozen tear.
Samuel Taylor Coleridge
#92. Security is mostly a superstition. It does not exist in nature, nor do the children of men as a whole experience it. Avoiding danger is no safer in the long run than outright exposure. Life is either a daring adventure, or nothing.
Helen Keller
#93. Unfortunately, Feng Shui has mingled with superstition. Luckily, it's easy to expose myths. Don't think 'things', think 'energy'.
Stefan Emunds
#94. Weakness, fear, melancholy, together with ignorance, are the true sources of superstition. Hope, pride, presumption, a warm indignation, together with ignorance, are the true sources of enthusiasm.
David Hume
#95. There is superstition in science quite as much as there is superstition in theology, and it is all the more dangerous because those suffering from it are profoundly convinced that they are freeing themselves from all superstition.
Theodore Roosevelt
#97. It is an infantile superstition of the human spirit that virginity would be thought a virtue and not the barrier that separates ignorance from knowledge.
Voltaire
#98. Fake Canadian superstition: If you allow your pet bear to sleep in your bed, it will ruin your breathing by slowing it down or stopping it entirely.
Matthew Santoro
#99. A child conceived on Christmas Eve is considered unlucky and will later resent his parents for their unholy transgression, their lack of control and piety. The child may be deformed with a harelip or be cursed with the ears and head of a wolf. Or the infant may be born a werewolf.
Jody Shields
#100. Appa enjoys our current prosperity with considerable hesitation, as if it were undeserved. He's given to quoting a proverb that says wealth shouldn't strike suddenly like a visitation, but instead grow gradually like a tree.
Vivek Shanbhag
