Hold each strange tale devoutly true. [ Collins ]

Superstition is but the fear of belief. [ Lady Blessington ]

Superstition is a senseless fear of God. [ Cicero ]

Superstition: a foolish fear of the Deity. [ La Bruyere ]

Superstition is the daughter of Ignorance. [ Mme. Deshoulieres ]

Superstition is part of the poetry of life. [ Goethe ]

My right eye itches, some good luck is near. [ Dryden ]

Superstition without a veil is a deformed thing. [ Bacon ]

Religion is not removed by removing superstition. [ Cicero ]

The birth of science was the death of superstition. [ Huxley ]

Superstition is a misdirection of religious feeling. [ Whately ]

Superstition excites storms; philosophy appeases them. [ Voltaire ]

Superstition is a quality that seems indigenous to the ocean. [ James Fenimore Cooper ]

The devil divides the world between atheism and superstition. [ English Proverb, collected by George Herbert ]

There are proselytes from atheism, but none from superstition. [ Junius ]

Superstition renders a man a fool, and skepticism makes him mad. [ Proverb ]

Religion worships God, while superstition profanes that worship. [ Seneca ]

Superstition is the only religion of which base souls are capable. [ Joubert ]

Superstition is but the fear of belief; religion is the confidence. [ Lady Blessington ]

Love is a superstition that doth fear the idol which itself hath made. [ Sir T. Overbury ]

Fanaticism is to superstition what delirium is to fever and rage to anger. [ Voltaire ]

Look how the world's poor people are amazed at apparitions, signs and prodigies! [ William Shakespeare ]

Heart-chilling superstition! thou canst glaze even Pity's eye with her own frozen tear. [ Coleridge ]

I die adoring God, loving my friends, not hating my enemies, and detesting superstition. [ Voltaire ]

A foolish superstition introduces the influences of the gods even in the smallest matters. [ Livy ]

Superstition is the poesy of life, so that it does not injure the poet to be superstitious. [ Johann Wolfgang von Goethe ]

Men are probably nearer to the essential truth in their superstitions than in their science. [ Thoreau ]

Superstition is an unreasoning fear of God; religion consists in the pious worship of the gods. [ Cicero ]

Why is it that we entertain the belief that for every purpose odd numbers are the most effectual? [ Pliny ]

Superstition is the poesy of practical life; hence, a poet is none the worse for being superstitious. [ Goethe ]

The superstition in which we were brought up never loses its power over us, even after we understand it. [ Lessing ]

In paganism light is mixed with darkness, and religion and truth are blended with superstition and error. [ Lindley Murray ]

Superstition is to religion what astrology is to astronomy: a very stupid daughter of a very wise mother. [ Voltaire ]

Superstition changes a man to a beast, fanaticism makes him a wild beast, and despotism a beast of burden. [ La Harpe ]

Science keeps down the weed of superstition, not by logic, but by rendering the mental soil unfit for its cultivation. [ Tyndall ]

A peasant can no more help believing in a traditional superstition than a horse can help trembling when he sees a camel. [ George Eliot ]

Superstition is certainly not the characteristic of this age. Yet some men are bigoted in politics who are infidels in religion. [ Junius ]

Wherever there is failure, there is some giddiness, some superstition about luck, some step omitted, which Nature never pardons. [ Emerson ]

Superstition always inspires littleness, religion grandeur of mind; the superstitious raises beings inferior to himself to deities. [ Lavater ]

The greatest burden in the world is superstition, not only of ceremonies in the church, but of imaginary and scarecrow sins at home. [ Milton ]

Danger is the very basis of superstition. It produces a searching after help supernaturally when human means are no longer supposed to be available. [ B. R. Haydon ]

I think we cannot too strongly attack superstition, which is the disturber of society; nor too highly respect genuine religion, which is the support of it. [ Rousseau ]

Superstition is in its death-lair; the last agonies may endure for decades or for centuries; but it carries the iron in its heart, and will not vex the earth any more. [ Carlyle ]

Superstition is passing away without return. Religion cannot pass away. The burning of a little straw may hide the stars in the sky; but the stars are there, and will re-appear. [ Carlyle ]

Superstition! that horrid incubus which dwelt in darkness, shunning the light, with all its racks, and poison chalices, and foul sleeping draughts, is passing away without return. [ Carlyle ]

I would rather dwell in the dim fog of superstition than in air rarefied to nothing by the air-pump of unbelief; in which the panting breast expires, vainly and convulsively gasping for breath. [ Richter ]

Enthusiasm is an evil much less to be dreaded than superstition. Superstition is the disease of nations; enthusiasm that of individuals: the former grows inveterate by time: the latter is cured by it. [ Robert Hall ]

Superstition is inherent in man's nature; and when we think it is wholly eradicated, it takes refuge in the strangest holes and corners, whence it peeps out all at once, as soon as it can do so with safety. [ Johann Wolfgang von Goethe ]

Superstition is related to this life, religion to the next; superstition allies itself to fatality, religion to virtue; it is by the vitality of earthly desires we become superstitious, and by the sacrifice of these desires that we become religious. [ Mme. de Staël ]

Atheism leaves a man to sense, to philosophy, to natural piety, to laws, to reputation, all which may be guides to an outward moral virtue, though religion were not; but superstition dismounts all these, and erecteth an absolute monarchy in the minds of men. [ Bacon ]

Nowadays enthusiasm is accounted folly; truth, cynicism; dissimulation, self-control; stiffness of manners, dignity; deception, cleverness; hypocrisy, decency; selfishness, economy; freedom of thought, effrontery; and superstition, the prop of human morals. What progress in language!

Superstition is the fear of a spirit whose passions and acts are those of a man, who is present in some places, and not in others; who makes some places holy, and not others; who is kind to one person, and unkind to another; who is pleased or angry according to the degree of attention you pay him, or praise you refuse him; who is hostile generally to human pleasure, but may be bribed by sacrificing a part of that pleasure into permitting the rest. [ John Ruskin ]