Magical Thinking Quotes

Although I was able to maintain a pleasant expression, I was mentally throwing up in her face. ~ Augusten Burroughs

I expected, as I approached the corporate world, to enter a brisk, logical, nonsense-free zone, almost like the military - or a disciplined, up-to-date military anyway - in its focus on concrete results. How else would companies survive fierce competition? But what I encountered was a culture riven with assumptions unrelated to those that underlie the fact- and logic-based worlds of, say science and journalism - a culture addicted to untested habits, paralyzed by conformity, and shot through with magical thinking. ~ Barbara Ehrenreich

Play, Incorporating Animistic and Magical Thinking Is Important Because It:
Fosters the healthy, creative and emotional growth of a child;
Forms the best foundation for later intellectual growth.
Provides a way in which children get to know the world and creates possibilities for different ways of responding to it.
Fosters empathy and wonder. ~ Rachel Carson

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

Our blind trust in the system is the product of ignorance and magical thinking, ~ William Landay

Once you consider the extent of the magical thinking that tends to be tied in to the fantasy of thinness, you can understand how threatening it is to consider the idea that you may never get the thin body you crave. It means that you never get to become the person you want to be. Wow! No wonder it's so painful to let go of the drive to lose weight! Accepting your body is not just about physicality, it's about accepting who you are, not continuing to wait until you become the person you imagine being. ~ Linda Bacon

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

The emotional transformation of engineering education isn't magical thinking. Nor is it a vague abstraction or a series of touchy-feely practices. It is based on a philosophy of education that is grounded in the real world and in the lives of the students we serve. It's available to everyone. It isn't expensive. It can't be accomplished in the old paradigm under the old assumptions about how education change happens, but in the right atmosphere, the change flows organically from the students themselves. That atmosphere requires systematic language change, culture change, and personal change by students, faculty, and all the stakeholders in education. ~ David Edward Goldberg

It's magical thinking to imagine that the reason unspeakable things are being perpetrated by younger and younger people is that they've fallen under the influence of seductive, lascivious, prurient, and violent material in books, films, television. A great deal of this type of censorship has to do with absolving parents of responsibility - parents who just plop their kids in front of the television and leave them there hour upon hour. ~ John Irving

When you do not trust yourself, what you feel, and what you know, you will expect people to be who they are not. You will hope against hope that they will do things you already know they cannot do. You will expect them to be who you want them to be rather than trusting what you know about who they are and what they are capable of doing. This is not trust. This is magical thinking, and engaging in it will set you up for a big letdown. Trusting yourself is important when dealing with others because it protects you from repeated violations and devastating heartbreaks. ~ Iyanla Vanzant

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

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

The only fully consistent alternative to belief in God, properly understood, is some version of "materialism" or "physicalism" or (to use the term most widely preferred at present) "naturalism"; and naturalism - the doctrine that there is nothing apart from the physical order, and certainly nothing supernatural - is an incorrigibly incoherent concept, and one that is ultimately indistinguishable from pure magical thinking. ~ David Bentley Hart

Life changes fast. Life changes in the instant. You sit down to dinner and life as you know it ends. ~ Joan Didion

The connection between dopamine and belief was established by experiments conducted by Peter Brugger and his colleague Christine Mohr at the University of Bristol in England. Exploring the neurochemistry of superstition, magical thinking, and belief in the paranormal, Brugger and Mohr found that people with high levels of dopamine are more likely to find significance in coincidences and pick out meaning and patterns where there are none. In one study, for example, they compared twenty self-professed believers in ghosts, gods, spirits, and conspiracies to twenty self-professed skeptics of such claims. They showed all subjects a series of slides consisting of people's faces, some of which were normal while others had their parts scrambled, such as swapping out eyes or ears or noses from different faces. In another experiment, real and scrambled words were flashed. In general, the scientists found that the believers were much more likely than the skeptics to mistakenly assess a scrambled face as real, and to read a scrambled word as normal.
In the second part of the experiment, Brugger and Mohr gave all forty subjects L-dopa, the drug used for Parkinson's disease patients that increases the levels of dopamine in the brain. They then repeated the slide show with the scrambled or real faces and words. The boost of dopamine caused both believers and skeptics to identify scrambled faces and real and jumbled words as normal. This suggests that patternicity may be associated with ~ Michael Shermer

It is a new day, new month, new year, but it isn't a new you. You are the same person dealing with the same problems that you cannot dispatch by tearing off the calendar page. Solutions come incrementally, however much the sliding into magical thinking seems permissible when grass lies under a foot of snow. ~ Thomm Quackenbush

Unfortunately, many controllists suffer from magical thinking. They believe that banning guns will somehow make them safer, as though laws are all we need to stop criminals. But consider for a second that you feel threatened for some reason and then ask yourself this: 'would you feel safer with a sign on your front window saying 'This house is a gun-free zone' or with an armed guard on call whenever you were home? If you wouldn't put this sign on your home, why would anyone think it's okay to put them in places where young children gather nearly every day? ~ Glenn Beck

In reality, genuine epiphanies are extremely rare. In contemporary adult life maturation & acquiescence to reality are gradual processes. Modern usage usually deploys epiphany as a metaphor. It is usually only in dramatic representations, religious iconography, and the 'magical thinking' of children that insight is compressed to a sudden blinding flash. ~ David Foster Wallace

She believed in magic - the magic of places, the magic of people, the magic of coincidences, serendipity, and fortune. She enjoyed wandering through the world with the open mind and curiosity of a four-year-old child. In her world the mystical, mythical, and magical inhabited the same space and time as the ordinary and the practical. At Bethesda Terrace, she always felt close to a source of magic and creativity. It was as if she was tapping into the place where dragons, angels, gods, sorceresses, and demons came to life. ~ Jamie Le Fay

To properly engage in magical thinking, I find you have to think of every possible ghastly scenario. That's the only way you outsmart fate. ~ A.J. Jacobs

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

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

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

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

Magical thinking makes you crazy - and renders everything possible. ~ Zadie Smith

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

I know why we try to keep the dead alive: we try to keep them alive in order to keep them with us. I also know that if we are to live ourselves there comes a point at which we must relinquish the dead, let them go, keep them dead. ~ Joan Didion

In Hollywood, primitive magical thinking exists side by side with the most advanced technology. ~ Hortense Powdermaker

Enlightenment humanism, then, is far from being a crowd-pleaser. The idea that the ultimate good is to use knowledge to enhance human welfare leaves people cold. Deep explanations of the universe, the planet, life, the brain? Unless they use magic, we don't want to believe them! Saving the lives of billions, eradicating disease, feeding the hungry? Bo-ring. People extending their compassion to all of humankind? Not good enough - we want the laws of physics to care about us! Longevity, health, understanding, beauty, freedom, love? There's got to be more to life than that! ~ Steven Pinker

Mass culture is Peter Pan culture. It tells us that if we close our eyes, if we visualize what we want, if we have faith in ourselves, if we tell God that we believe in miracles, if we tap into our inner strength, if we grasp that we are truly exceptional, if we focus on happiness, our lives will be harmonious and complete. This cultural retreat into illusion, whether peddled by positive psychologists, Hollywood, or Christian preachers, is a form of magical thinking. It turns worthless mortgages and debt into wealth. It turns the destruction of our manufacturing base into an opportunity for growth. It turns alienation and anxiety into a cheerful conformity. It turns a nation that wages illegal wars and administers off-shore penal colonies where it openly practices torture into the greatest democracy on earth. ~ Chris Hedges

A lot of people are not comfortable being apart from the group, from the whole herd, and listening to the inner voice. They just follow what the crowd does and wear what the crowd wears and think what the crowd thinks. They get very caught up in doing what the world says is the cool thing to do and living the way the rest of the world lives. Once we make a decision to break away from that and not be part of the herd anymore - by going inside and finding our own voice - then life just becomes magical. ~ Echo Bodine

One person's magical thinking is another person's cynicism. ~ Damon Lindelof

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

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

In supernatural horror stories, however, magical thinking is a completely different matter. Those characters contending with what seems to be the work of magic will deny till the very last moment that anything magical is going on. They will invoke reason and evidence and eek out corroborations for the cause of their problems. But readers of these stories are rarely, if ever, on the side of these characters. They desperately want to believe that there is indeed something magical going on and they are primed to accept it whenever it occurs. Some readers especially enjoy a story with bad magic, as it assures them that magic is confined to fiction and will not leak into their real lives. This is the most perverse form of magical thinking and the one least likely to be recognized as such. ~ Thomas Ligotti

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

It is possible to induce incorrect notions of cause and effect in most people in just a few minutes. All that is necessary is to expose them to rewards which they believe they are generating based on their actions when in fact the rewards are randomly awarded. People will latch onto any seeming success and repeat it, even when they have to explain repeated failures as well. It appears practically impossible, or at least very rare, for humans not to be influenced by immediate experiences of concrete results. This is true even if the experiences turn out to have limited theoretical validity. The moment of surprise is not when people repeat alchemical failures but when they begin to do something else. ~ Naomi Janowitz

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

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

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

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

We should be cautiously open to the spiritual and non-rational, and skeptical of the more invisible magical thinking - what we might call "magical reason" - pervading secular thought and experience in modern society. Science and technology are for most people a new religion, and their orthodoxies are believed with the same fervor. ~ David Watson

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

As a person, I do ascribe to a lot of magical thinking myself. ~ Lauren Groff

What did I think of Princeton? Well, the answer to that question requires a story. When I first arrived, I looked around me at the Gothic buildings - younger, I later learned, than many of the mosques of this city, but made through acid treatment and ingenious stone-masonry to look older ... ~ Mohsin Hamid

I always think of my sins when I weed. They grow apace in the same way and are harder still to get rid of. ~ Helena Rutherfurd Ely

Alice, you might be the product of the biggest ball of ignorance, confidence, and good fortune the universe has ever manufactured. But if you're thinking that you can take your results at the virtual tables and your grand tactic of Ignorance Is Bliss, and make that work for the Main Event, forget it - it WON'T. ~ Elle Lothlorien

I don't think there's a conflation between somebody's personal wealth and whether they should run for office or not, assuming that they're not actually pursuing policies that help them make a lot of money. ~ Julie Roginsky

Teaching I realized took up a lot of my time. I was a kind of a teacher that spent time with students, spoke to them after class, tried to help them out. I'd talk with them personally about their work and try to get out of them what they were thinking about, forcing them to thinking seriously and not just falling back on all the ideas that they had picked up someplace. And so I took my job teaching very seriously and that - as a result, it took up a lot of time. ~ Robert Barry

In a broader sense, Systems Thinking is a path to greater awareness. ~ Pearl Zhu

Now I can walk into a room full of people I don't know and do my job. That's quite a massive thing to learn, I think. ~ Kate Moss

I think of empathy as a set of cumulative effects, ideally - that it can be a force shaping your habits, shaping where you put your attention and then - if you're hard on yourself, in good ways - pushing you to translate that attention into action, on whatever scale. ~ Leslie Jamison

You are so ridiculous," said the lion. "Thinking that your thinking is worth thinking about. ~ John Joseph Adams

The world exists on thousands of different levels and just because some are more tragic than others, it doesn't make them any more valid. You fall into that way of thinking and you become so overwhelmed by the world's suffering, you go mad. ~ Bella Pollen

Think about the metric by which your life will be judged, and make a resolution to live every day so that in the end, your life will be judged a success. ~ Clayton Christensen

I think a lot of Hollywood is in retreat right now trying to figure out how to make money and make the safest bets. ~ Judd Apatow

Sometimes we attribute certain things we do not understand to the demon, not thinking they may be things of God that we do not understand. ~ Gabriel Garcia Marquez

A job is not a career. I think I started out with a job. It turned into a career and changed my life. ~ Barbara Walters

Storage, after all, is the magical act of finding a home for your belongings. ~ Marie Kondo

Self fulfillment thinks of how something serves me. Self development thinks of how something helps me to serve others. With self fulfillment, feeling good is the product. With self development, feeling good is the by-product. ~ John C. Maxwell

I think you'd change Alabama fundamentally if in six years someone said, 'If you want the best education in America, you've got to live in Alabama.' you'd change economic development, change the image of this state, you'd offer these kids an opportunity they otherwise would never have had. ~ Bob Riley

Look at where I landed, you would think I planned it. I'm just doin me and you can never understand it. ~ Drake

I've found that the only way to make theatre that gets the audience thinking is when I feel uncomfortable making it. ~ Young Jean Lee

I think we ought to give ourselves more time. We should be more patient with ourselves and with each other. ~ Maya Angelou

I stumbled into soul music at a very young age. It had something that really spoke to me. ~ Erik Hassle

I don't think about music as being new or modern. I just play. ~ Coleman Hawkins

But it is not time constraints alone that produce such fragmented and discontinuous language. When a television show is in process, it is very nearly impermissible to say, "Let me think about that" or "I don't know" or "What do you mean when you say ... ?" or "From what sources does your information come?" This type of discourse not only slows down the tempo of the show but creates the impression of uncertainty or lack of finish. It tends to reveal people in the act of thinking, which is as disconcerting and boring on television as it is on a Las Vegas stage. Thinking does not play well on television, a fact that television directors discovered long ago. There is not much to see in it. It is, in a phrase, not a performing art. But television demands a performing art. ~ Neil Postman

Awareness takes over from thinking. Instead of being in charge of your life, thinking becomes the servant of awareness. ~ Eckhart Tolle

On television, journalists now routinely appear on talk-shows-with-an-attitude where they are encouraged to say what they think about something they may not have finished thinking about. ~ Ellen Goodman

I don't know a single collector or museum director who says: 'Oh, he's on a list, so I think I'll buy something of his.' The people who buy my art put a little more thought into it than that. ~ Olafur Eliasson

A fool suffers, thinking,
"I have children! I have wealth!"
One's self is not even one's own.
How then are children? How then is wealth? ~ Gautama Buddha

I have this idea that the reason we have dreams is that we're thinking about things that we don't know we're thinking about-and those things,well,they sneak out of us in our dreams.Maybe we're like tires with too much air in them.The air has to leak out.That's what dreams are. ~ Benjamin Alire Saenz

What a battle a man must fight everywhere to maintain his standing army of thoughts, and march with them in orderly array throughthe always hostile country! How many enemies there are to sane thinking! Every soldier has succumbed to them before he enlists for those other battles. ~ Henry David Thoreau

If you don't think you're a winner, you don't belong here. ~ Vince Lombardi