“You calculated how to be uncalculating, and are natural by art!”
The Hand of Ethelberta (1876), ch. 20
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Thomas Hardy 171
English novelist and poet 1840–1928Related quotes

14 June 1853
Correspondence, Letters to Madame Louise Colet

Source: The Black Swan: The Impact of the Highly Improbable (2007), p. 128

The Art of Magic (1891)
Context: No one regards the magician today as other than an ordinary man gifted with no extraordinary powers. The spectators come, not to be impressed with awe, but fully aware that his causes and effects are natural. They come rather as a guessing committee, to spy out the methods with which he mystifies. Hundreds of eyes are upon him. Men with more knowledge of the sciences than he come to trip and expose him, and to baffle their scrutiny is the study of his life. Long years of training and exercise alone will not make a magician. … There must be some natural aptitude for the art; it must be born in a man, and can never be acquired by rule. He must be alert both in body and in mind; cool and calculating to the movement of a muscle under all circumstances; a close student of men and human nature. To these qualifications he must add the rather incongruous quality of a mind turning on contradictions. With a scientific cause he must produce a seemingly opposite effect to that warranted by order and system.
I know of no life requiring such a series of opposite qualities as the magician's. And after the exercise of all these qualities I have named, resulting in the production of the most startling and novel results, the magician has not the satisfaction, like other men, of the enjoyment of his own product. He must be prepared to see it copied by others, or after a short time discovered by the public.

1881, A Defence of Atheism: A lecture delivered in Mercantile Hall, Boston on 10 April, 1861, p. 4
A Defence of Atheism

La Système de la nature; quoted in The Law of Reason, published by J. Thompson, p. 40.
Variant: Now, if the ignorance of nature gave birth to Gods, the knowledge of nature is calculated to destroy them.

“The great sixteenth century divorce between art and science came with accelerated calculators.”
Source: 1960s, The Gutenberg Galaxy (1962), p. 205

Joseph Kosuth in: Arthur R. Rose, “Four Interviews,” Arts Magazine (February, 1969).

Source: 1870s - 1880s, The Writings of a Savage (1996), pp. 5 & 22: Gauguin is advising a fellow painter, 1885