Quotes About Magical Thinking

#1. Paganism is the default of most children, since they excel at magical thinking.

Thomm Quackenbush

#2. The Christian take on Hellfire seems less dramatic than the Muslim vision, which I grew up with, but Christian magical thinking appeals to me no more than my mother's angels and djinns.

Ayaan Hirsi Ali

#3. Magical thinking makes you crazy - and renders everything possible.

Zadie Smith

#4. Change is not, then, a matter of "magical" thinking or waving a "wand" - it is about pushing ideas, building movements, and challenging the status quo.

Christopher Cook

#5. Certainly our cultural fallback position seems to be that our technologies will get us out of everything they have got us into. That looks like a magical thinking to me, but we don't really have a better idea.

Paul Kingsnorth

#6. In my book (and this is my book!) magical thinking is the alchemy that you can use to visualize and project yourself into the professional and personal life that you want.

Sophia Amoruso

#7. Just think for how long humanity was controlled by mystical, magical thinking - the diseases and suffering that led to. We managed to survive, but just barely. It wasn't pretty.

Neil DeGrasse Tyson

#8. I'm disturbed when people let superstition, magical thinking, extreme conspiracy theories and so on blur their minds.

John Shirley

#9. For all our secular rationalism and technological advances, potential for surrender to the charms of magical thinking remains embedded in the human psyche, awaiting only the advertiser to awaken it.

Tim Wu

#10. Our blind trust in the system is the product of ignorance and magical thinking,

William Landay

#11. Too many people confuse real magic with magical thinking. Real magic isn't a trick and it transforms our lives. Magical thinking is denial.
Real magic is what happens when we break old belief patterns and have the courage to employ the native laws of the Universe

Jacob Nordby

#12. It's why a kid army makes sense. Adults don't waste their time on magical thinking. They dwell on the same inconvenient truths that

Rick Yancey

#13. Perhaps it is a child's magical thinking. But you cannot know a place until you know the stories it tells about itself.

Sean Wallace

#14. Fairytales are healthy for the children. As they grow up, the magical thinking wears off, but the fairytale-induced creative brain circuits stay forever.

Abhijit Naskar

#15. The magical thinking encouraged by any belief in the supernatural, combined with the vilification of rationality and skepticism, is more conducive to conspiracy theories than it is to productive political debate.

Wendy Kaminer

#16. You give anybody a billion dollars, and of course they are passionate. Passion is one of those things like willpower in that there's 'magical thinking' about it. You've got to be careful about 'magical thinking.'

Scott Adams

#17. It's hard to resist the magical thinking that the work habits of great writers are the key to their greatness.

Zoe Heller

#18. We can no more tolerate neutrality and benevolence toward every conceivable form of discourse, including that of magical thinking, than we can lump together executioner and victim, good and evil.

Michel Onfray

#19. A vision without a plan is fantasy. A plan without a vision is mediocrity. Believing 'God will do it for you' is magical thinking. Believing you can do it yourself is the ultimate arrogance. Plan your life as if you're doing the work
but live your life as if God is.

Derek Rydall

#20. One person's magical thinking is another person's cynicism.

Damon Lindelof

#21. Dr. S. talked to me about magical thinking. She was right. Much depends on chance, on what we can't control, on others. She did not say that writing to Boris was a bad idea, but then she never judged anything. That was her magic. [p. 85]

Siri Hustvedt

#22. As a person, I do ascribe to a lot of magical thinking myself.

Lauren Groff

#23. This magical thinking, this idea that human and personal progress is somehow inevitable, leads to political passivity. ... It has turned whole nations, such as the United States, into self-consuming machines of death.

Chris Hedges

#24. Religious fundamentalism, magical thinking and self-delusion, have been justifications for some of the most horrific atrocities in human history.

Bryant McGill

#25. Often you hear stories about never working with children. I disagree because children still have that residual magical thinking. They haven't had their imagination knocked out of them by turning into adults and life experiences.

Nicolas Cage

#26. If anxiety is the major force of our contemporary condition, a lot of poetry - including my own, mostly - sort of tries to escape that, fly off into magical thinking or bewilderment or whatever.

Mike Young

#27. There's a kind of magical thinking about these kinds of things. Throw away those bad photos before the "magic" attaches to them, so the good ones stand out.

Gretchen Rubin

#28. A third-grader when WWII started, I was also waging my own "war effort." It was deeply magical thinking - I really thought what I did or didn't do could save lives, win battles, bring my dad and uncles home safe. And conversely, that if I screwed up, they were all in greater danger.

Ann Medlock

#29. After Princeton, the years seem like a blur, but the days seem more like rapid fire. - Donald Rumsfeld in Year of Magical Thinking

Joan Didion

#30. Kids delight in 'magical thinking', whether in the form of the Tooth Fairy or the saints: whether you see these as comforting lies or eternal verities, they are part of how we help kids make sense of the world.

Emma Donoghue

#31. Everyone has this notion of the Middle Ages - certainly the early Middle Ages - as being this very superstitious era. I think that all eras are superstitious. We all have our magical thinking.

Nicola Griffith

#32. Science trumps magical thinking: there was a reason the Incas called their mercury mine 'la mina de los muertos,' the mine of the dead. Building a life and a community upon principles that ignore such realities is doomed to fail.

Floyd Skloot

#33. In Hollywood, primitive magical thinking exists side by side with the most advanced technology.

Hortense Powdermaker

#34. The natural inclination in all humans is to posit a force, a spirit, outside of us. That tendency toward superstitious magical thinking is just built into our nature.

Michael Shermer

#35. I love Marilyn Monroe. I think she was the coolest blonde. I think like me she just didn't care what anyone thinks. She's happy. She's smiling. I don't know, I just always thought she was so beautiful and she just seemed, like, magical.

Paris Hilton

#36. Ultimately, all diseases are magical diseases ...
("Gas Station Carnival")

Thomas Ligotti

#37. I grew up thinking that they were a fairy tale, you know? It turns out they were just like anyone else. Somehow that makes it even more magical.

Kiera Cass

#38. I want people to think that I'm a magical, weird-looking freak of nature, but they really see me as a sexy Amazon jungle cat. That makes sense - I'm a little bit of both, but I definitely lean toward the narwhal side of the equation.

Kesha

#39. We have to recognize that spirituality is a legitimate dimension in the psyche. It's a legitimate dimension in the universal scheme of things. It doesn't mean that you are superstitious, that you are in to magical, primitive thinking, if you take spirituality seriously.

Stanislav Grof

#40. I think creativity becomes really beautiful and magical when you allow it to do what it's needing you to do.

Brandy Norwood

#41. When you let go of the need for any and all outcomes life becomes a creative magical adventure.

Deepak Chopra

#42. Schuyler kept count, thinking that maybe once she hit a magical number, it would stop hurting.

Melissa De La Cruz

#43. I totally believe in magic. Because my life, I think, has been very magic, and magical things have come true for me time after time after time.

Stevie Nicks

#44. Although I was able to maintain a pleasant expression, I was mentally throwing up in her face.

Augusten Burroughs

#45. If I shut everything else out and filled the room with memories, the past could become the present, and I could live there, with him. I would never leave.

Na

#46. I love writing with Colbie [Caillat]. We have something very magical together that's difficult to describe. We're very comfortable with each other, and that's really important for co-writing. I think both of us bring different things to each song.

Jason Reeves

#47. It's misleading to think of writers as special creatures, word sorcerers who possess some sort of magical knowledge hidden from everyone else. Writers are ordinary people who like to write. They feel the urge to write, and they scratch that itch every chance they get.

Ralph Fletcher

#48. I think that children have a power to imagine that is almost magical when compared to the adult imagination, and this is something irrevocable that a child loses when he or she becomes bound by logic. We adults continue to have our children

Joseph Weizenbaum

#49. I guess I had always sort of fantasized that a guy would see me and get past the ponytail and the glasses and the giant sweatshirt to discover how insanely awesome I am, then come and whisk me off into that magical teenager fairytale where everyone else gets to prance around.

Jeff Sampson

#50. People who are slavish to a fantasy ideology become very lonely in the world. It's very alienating and sometimes reality is very threatening to this magical way of thinking. On the other hand, if it is a politician or leader that chooses for whatever reason to remain

Mark Ruffalo

#51. Film is a truly magical medium. You can create illusions of reality, make people think they've seen things that they really haven't - like blowing a guy's head off with a shotgun.

Tom Savini

#52. I think that it's important to try to keep reality. I think that Gabriel Garcia Marquez speaks a lot about reality in his magical realism. So I don't think we have to be hyper-realistic. But we have to understand the pressures that undergird the lives of the characters within that novel.

Walter Mosley

#53. People normally view my work as fantasy, which on some level is true, but I do think that my work is more magical realist than fantasy. I believe in the fantasies within each of our realities, i.e., I portray very relatable human issues in a very realistic tone, yet in a magical setting.

Shahad Ameen

#54. I think drugs are part of the magical possibilities of youth and I wouldn't be here if I had continued with it.

Anne Lamott

#55. There's something very magical about water and what happens to it when it freezes. I don't think there's anything else in the world, perhaps in our universe, that is quite like ice.

Ira Flatow

#56. Since I learned the Secret and started applying it to my life, my life has truly become magical, I think the kind of life that everybody dreams of and I live on a day to day basis.

Jack Canfield

#57. If you don't understand how the world works, then everything is a mystery to you. If everything is magical and mysterious, then you really don't work on logic anymore. Then, everything is all about belief.

Joy Reidenberg

#58. Everyone thinks they've won the Magical Belief Lottery. Everyone thinks they more or less have a handle on things, that they, as opposed to the billions who disagree with them, have somehow lucked into the one true belief system.

R. Scott Bakker

#59. What a magical place," she whispered in an awed voice. "I expect a unicorn or fairies to appear."
"What would the fairies be doing?" Shermont asked. "Waltzing with the butterflies," she answered before thinking.

Laurie Brown

#60. As a scientist, I am not sure anymore that life can be reduced to a class struggle, to dialectical materialism, or any set of formulas. Life is spontaneous and it is unpredictable, it is magical. I think that we have struggled so hard with the tangible that we have forgotten the intangible.

Diane Frolov

#61. America is a magical place, and I think my job, or the job of a lot of us European filmmakers is to just hold up America to Americans and present it to you in a new way. All I wanted to do is in a funny way say, "Look at your country. It's magnificent."

Hans Zimmer

#62. I'm always sort of looking for projects that I can sort of put out into the world, into the public sphere, and to somehow cause an effect. I want to be able to create projects that sort of are going to make people think and think in this sort of magical, sort of fantastical way.

Nick Cave

#63. And spare me the jokes about scoring."
"Dammit, woman, you read my mind," he said. "Is there no filthy wordplay you can't forsee?"
"It's my special magical power. I can read your mind when you're thinking dirty thoughts."
"So, ninety-five percent of the time.

Cassandra Clare

#64. A powerful tool in the early stages of developing scenarios is to pretend the interface is magic. If your persona has goals and the product has magical powers to meet them, how simple could the interaction be? This kind of thinking is useful to help designers look outside the box.

Alan Cooper

#65. Owen remarked The basis of science and art is magical - vice versa, magic is art and science. It goes both ways. There's not ever black and white ... in magic or in anything to my way of thinking.

Luvelle Raevan

#66. My stories take three or four months to fix, and it's not magical of a process. Ultimately it's a boring, difficult process. I write everything out, and then the parts I think are funny I put in bold. Then I go perform it. Then the parts that aren't funny, I unbold them.

Kumail Nanjiani

#67. Even though I worked hard at times, it was always magical. I have to confess I enjoyed every minute of it. Even the down times I enjoyed, because we were creating something that would make people smile and lift their hearts. You can't think of a better job than that.

Floyd Norman

#68. There's always been this hocus-pocus or magical, mystical thing associated with the making of film that sort of psyches people out and makes them think that this cannot be done; that this is a craft that cannot be learned.

Spike Lee

#69. If you don't think there is magic in writing, you probably won't write anything magical.

Terry Brooks

#70. I think I'll try to keep working in film for a little bit. There's something still kind of magical about it, that I don't want to let go of.

Joe Swanberg

#71. I don't think that there is anything that is really magical unless it has a terrifying quality.

Andrew Wyeth

#72. I think colors are miraculous. We live in a universe that is extremely creative and magical. We become happier as we appreciate these things in nature.

Alice Walker

#73. I think Gram did his best work in co-writes. Sometimes when you're working with one other person, it's such a magical thing. You're editing each other and you're trying to create that one spark.

Chris Hillman

#74. Luck is not a magical ability or a gift from the gods. Instead, it is a way of thinking and behaving.

Richard Wiseman

#75. The habits of craft, developed day in and day out over a working lifetime, create moments of astonishment, sublime and magical effects, precisely because the writer is not thinking overtly about making art.

Philip Gerard

#76. As long as you have those brilliant songs, it didn't matter how bad you played, or how bad he sang on 'em sometimes. It was one of those magical things that really worked, and I don't think could ever happen again.

Donnie Fritts

#77. Teenage girls engage in emotional reasoning, which is the belief that if you feel something is true, it must be true. If a teenager feels like a nerd, she is a nerd ... There is a limited ability to sort facts from feelings. Thinking is still magical in the sense that thinking something makes it so.

Mary Pipher

#78. And I don't think we should be continuing to propagate the idea that famous people are magical or special because it makes people feel like their lives ain't no good.

Russell Brand

#79. People have responded to the pictures I make as mystical things, and they somehow carry the illusion further thinking that the place is this mystical, magical place. The desert is also a very barren place, a very lonely place, a very boring, uneventful place.

Richard Misrach

#80. Yesterday I was thinking about the whole idea of genius and creative people, and the notion that if you create some magical art, somehow that exempts you from having to pay attention to the small things.

Bell Hooks

#81. I think loads of people see acting, when they're kids, as these magical stories that just happen within the context of the film or the play or the cartoon or whatever they're seeing. They don't imagine that there are actually people that go and do that for a living.

Rebecca Hall