“Science is always discovering odd scraps of magical wisdom and making a tremendous fuss about its cleverness.”
Source: The Confessions of Aleister Crowley: An Autohagiography
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Aleister Crowley 142
poet, mountaineer, occultist 1875–1947Related quotes
Source: Dreaming the Dark: Magic, Sex and Politics (1982), Ch. 1 : Power-Over and Power-From-WIthin, p. 13

“Challenging the conventional wisdom is the way to make waves in science.”
[James Lovelock: Challenge the dogma! (Web of Stories), YouTube, 6 August 2010, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gA8FbEHsgus]

Source: Kritik der zynischen Vernunft [Critique of Cynical Reason] (1983), p. 536

Duke University, 01/03/2012 http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rYcOoqxuroI&t=54m51s
The Magic Of Reality (2012)
Source: The Magic of Reality: How We Know What's Really True
Context: Don’t ever be lazy enough, defeatist enough, cowardly enough to say “I don't understand it so it must be a miracle - it must be supernatural - God did it”. Say instead, that it’s a puzzle, it’s strange, it’s a challenge that we should rise to. Whether we rise to the challenge by questioning the truth of the observation, or by expanding our science in new and exciting directions - the proper and brave response to any such challenge is to tackle it head-on. And until we've found a proper answer to the mystery, it's perfectly ok simply to say “this is something we don't yet understand - but we're working on it”. It's the only honest thing to do. Miracles, magic and myths, they can be fun. Everybody likes a good story. Myths are fun, as long as you don't confuse them with the truth. The real truth has a magic of its own. The truth is more magical, in the best and most exciting sense of the word, than any myth or made-up mystery or miracle. Science has its own magic - the magic of reality.
“Our cleverness has grown prodigiously - but not our wisdom.”
in a letter http://www.scribd.com/doc/5062627/Ryle to Professor Carlos Chagas, president of the Pontifical Academy of Sciences, 24 February 1983.
Context: The benefits of medical research are real - but so are the potential horrors of genetic engineering and embryo manipulation. We devise heart transplants, but do little for the 15 million who die annually of malnutrition and related diseases. Our cleverness has grown prodigiously - but not our wisdom.