Thoughtful Thursday, 13 of October - magic and other paranormal activities

Welcome to Thoughtful Thursday!

I chose the 13th day of October deliberately to ask you some questions about the paranormal. Do you believe in ghosts? Do you believe in magic? Do you think there are things which simply defy science and reason? Have you had any paranormal experiences?  Would you like to share?

Here are some quotes I chose as food for thought:

Mystery is the basic appeal of magic. Once the secrets are known, the magician becomes a mere manipulator, an actor in a suspense drama which has little impact because the audience knows the ending in advance.
MILBOURNE CHRISTOPHER, Magic: A Picture History

There is nothing special in the world. Nothing magic. Just physics.
CHUCK PALAHNIUK, Diary

Magic and all that is ascribed to it is a deep presentiment of the powers of science.
RALPH WALDO EMERSON, Essays


Magic is a faculty of wonderful virtue, full of most high mysteries, containing the most profound contemplation of most secret things, together with the nature, power, quality, substance and virtues thereof, as also the knowledge of whole Nature, and it doth instruct us concerning the differing and agreement of things amongst themselves, whence it produceth its wonderful effects, by uniting the virtues of things through the application of them one to the other.
HEINRICH CORNELIUS AGRIPPA, Three Books of Occult Philosophy or Magic


Magic trick: to make people disappear, ask them to fulfill their promises.
(Mason Cooley (b. 1927), U.S. aphorist. City Aphorisms, Sixth Selection, (1989).) I loved that one.

Magic is not a practice. It is a living, breathing web of energy that, with our permission, can encase our every action.
DOROTHY MORRISON, Everyday Magic

We do not need magic to change the world. We carry all the power we need inside ourselves already: we have the power to imagine better.
J. K. ROWLING, speech to Harvard Alumni Association, 2008

Reality is determined not by what scientists or anyone else says or believes, but by what the evidence reveals to us.

–– ALAN HALE

There are three classes of people: those who see. Those who see when they are shown. Those who do not see.
–– LEONARDO DA VINCI

The most important sense to investigate the psychic sense is common sense.

–– WILLIAM ROLL

Now it is the time of night

That the graves, all gaping wide,

Every one lets forth his sprite

In the church-way paths to glide.

WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE, A Midsummer Night's Dream

All heart they live, all head, all eye, all ear,

All intellect, all sense, and as they please

They limb themselves, and colour, shape, or size,

Assume, as likes them best, condense or rare

JOHN MILTON, Paradise Lost

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