Knowledge has always been important, of course. The ancient Egyptians did not raise the stones for the pyramids relying on the incantations of their gods. The waters in the irrigation canals of the great Indus Civilisation did not flow according to the laws of ignorance. Knowledge has always been power and wealth.
— Mahathir Mohamad
Helpful Incantations quotations
Drive my dead thoughts over the universe Like withered leaves to quicken a new birth! And, by the incantation of this verse, Scatter, as from an unextinguished hearth Ashes and sparks, my words among mankind! Be through my lips to unawakened earth The trumpet of a prophecy! O, wind, If Winter comes, can Spring be far behind?
When I try to use incantations at work i often find they have no effect and my coworkers just laugh at me.
The soul is cured of its maladies by certain incantations;
these incantations are beautiful reasons, from which temperance is generated in souls.
It seems to me that the orthodox religions always know more about the Devil than I do and can describe him in more detail, and if I hadn't a nice type of mind I'd begin to wonder what company they keep when the moon rides high in the sky and good witches are doing simple little incantations and asking for spiritual guidance.
The origins of poetry are clearly rooted in obscurity, in secretiveness, in incantation, in spells that must at once invoke and protect, tell the secret and keep it.
Poetry is a sort of inspired mathematics, which gives us equations, not for abstract figures, triangles, squares, and the like, but for the human emotions. If one has a mind which inclines to magic rather than science, one will prefer to speak of these equations as spells or incantations; it sounds more arcane, mysterious, recondite.
It can be a way of knowledge, a path, an inspiration, a Tao, an ordering, a memory, a fantasy, a seduction, a prayer, a summoning, an incantation murmured under the breath as the torchlights sink lower and the forest looms taller and the wolves howl louder and the fire prepares for its submission to the encroaching dark.
Work with sound until you are absolutely amazed that you can produce such a sound and it seems to you that you are just the instrument to which the divine pied piper blows the whisper of the incantations of his magic spell.
Life consists Of propositions about life.
The human Revery is a solitude in which We compose these propositions, torn by dreams, By the terrible incantations of defeats And by the fear that the defeats and the dreams are one. The whole race is a poet that writes down The eccentric propositions of its fate.
Certainly, the history of my life and the works of art which have especially enriched it is precisely that: the depiction or incantation of a handful of metaphors whose spendour rests upon their intonation.
Science is simply a logical process of discovering truths about the world we live in; the illusion is that science is some sort of a set of strange rules, a religion that speaks algebra or a magical group of incantations and spells.
Not to waste time on nonsense. Not to be taken in by conjurors and hoodoo artists with their talk about incantations and exorcism and all the rest of it. Not to be obsessed with quail-fighting or other crazes like that.
Over the span of man's history, although a phenomenal amount of education, persuasion, indoctrination and incantation have been devoted to the effort, ordinary people have never been quite persuaded that toil is as agreeable as its alternatives. Thus to take increased well-being partly in the form of more goods and partly in the form of more leisure is unquestionably rational.
When I contrast the loving Jesus, comprehending all things in his ample and tender charity, with those who profess to bear his name, marking their zeal by what they do not love, it seems to me as though men, like the witches of old, had read the Bible backward, and had taken incantations out of it for evil, rather than inspiration for good.
Just as a prism of glass miters light and casts a colored braid, a garden sings sweet incantations the human heart strains to hear. Hiding in every flower, in every leaf, in every twig and bough, are reflections of the God who once walked with us in Eden.
The principle of majority rule is the mildest form in which the force of numbers can be exercised. It is a pacific substitute for civil war in which the opposing armies are counted and the victory is awarded to the larger before any blood is shed. Except in the sacred tests of democracy and in the incantations of the orators, we hardly take the trouble to pretend that the rule of the majority is not at bottom a rule of force.
We may be through with the past, but the past is not through with us.
Ideas of the Stone Age exist side by side with the latest scientific thought. Only a fraction of mankind has emerged from the Dark Ages, and in the most lucid brains, as Logan Pearsall Smith has said, we come upon nests of woolly caterpillars. Seemingly sane men entrust their wealth to stargazers and their health to witch doctors. Giant planes throb through the stratosphere, but half their passengers are wearing magic amulets and are protected from harm by voodoo incantations. Hotels boast of express elevators and a telephone in every room, but omit thirteen from all floor and room numbers lest their guests be ill at ease.
We teach that every priest shall extinguish heathendom, and forbid wilweorthunga (fountain worship), and licwiglunga (incantations of the dead), and hwata (omens), and galdra (magic), and man worship, and the abominations that men exercise in various sorts of witchcraft, and in frithspottum (peace-enclosures) with elms and other trees, and with stones, and with many phantoms.
Besides writing, I have been teaching myself to 'develop' my own photographic plates, and I haven't a stick of clothing or an exposed finger that isn't stained. I sit for hours in a dark-room feeling as if I were a very elderly Faust at some dreadful incantation, and come out of it, blinding at the light, like a Bastille prisoner. And yet I am not successful!
The Lord's Prayer is an excellent model, but it was never intended to be a magical incantation to get God's attention. Jesus gave this prayer as a pattern to suggest the variety of elements that should be included when we pray.
Where prayer, amulets and incantations work it is only a manifestation of the patient's belief.
Virtually all the trends that matter are making a mockery of the industry's ritual incantations about the values and virtues of a free press in a free society.
Explain to me again the difference between superstitious beliefs or pagan incantations, and scientific ones. Be braver - you cannot cross a chasm in two small jumps.
Every true artist does feel, consciously or unconsciously, that he is touching transcendental truths; that his images are shadows of things seen through the veil. In other words, the natural mystic does know that there is something there, something behind the clouds or within the trees; but he believes that the pursuit of beauty is the way to find it; that imagination is a sort of incantation that can call it up.
That phrase "hocus-pocus" started out as "hocus-pocus dominocus", and was, in the beginning, a mocking imitation of the holy incantations of the Catholic Church's Latin liturgy. So say the lexicologists.
It is not too much to say that next after the passion to learn there is no quality so indispensable to the successful prosecutionof science as imagination. Find me a people whose early medicine is not mixed up with magic and incantations, and I will find you a people devoid of all scientific ability.
In sober mornings do not thou rehearse The holy incantation of a verse
Let's get my incantation right: "I wish I may, I wish I might" Give earth another satellite.
My notion of art is very maximalist and souped-up: I love spectacle, overload, magic materials, magic words, incantation and litany, incarnation and possession, spilling and wounds. Art as a sacred event.
I would have to say the power to heal.
This show has enhanced my relationship to magic. I would have called it prayer. There are definitely certain incantations that I do now.
Voltaire remarked that it is possible to kill a flock of sheep by witchcraft if you give them plenty of arsenic at the same time. The sheep, in this figure, may well stand for the complacent apologists of capitalism; Marx's penetrating insight and bitter hatred of oppression supply the arsenic, while the labour theory of value provides the incantations.
Every morning I have been looking at CNN to see if there is any reason for hope.
I see a few large and impressive peace protests here and there around the world, but mostly I see empty robot faces monotonously reciting the magic incantations, "We must support the President" and "We must support our troops," both of which mean the killing must continue.
In primitive society, where uniformity of occupation is the rule, and the distribution of the community into various classes of workers has hardly begun, every man is more or less his own magician; he practices charms and incantations for his own good and the injury of his enemies.
Much discussion of money involves a heavy overlay of priestly incantation.