quotations about miracles
Miracles don't happen. You make them happen. They're not wishes or dreams or candles on a cake.
JULIE ANNE PETERS
Far from Xanadu
A man who saw a miracle would reject his eyes' witness, if those with him saw nothing.
URSULA K. LE GUIN
The Lathe of Heaven
For some reason or the other man looks for the miracle, and to accomplish it he will wade through blood. He will debauch himself with ideas, he will reduce himself to a shadow if for only one second of his life he can close his eyes to the hideousness of reality. Everything is endured--disgrace, humiliation, poverty, war, crime, ennui--in the belief that overnight something will occur, a miracle, which will render life tolerable.
HENRY MILLER
Tropic of Cancer
Knowledge has its boundary line, where it abuts on ignorance; on the outside of that boundary line are ignorance and miracles; on the inside of it are science and no miracles.
HORACE MANN
Thoughts
Miracles are like facts of animal magnetism, or table-turning. They come into existence only where there are people ready beforehand to believe in them.
S. F. S.
The Month, vol. 126
The spirit which in the modern Church has sometimes sought to found Christian faith on signs and wonders appears to me to be almost as much one of unbelief as the spirit which outside the Church denies the miraculous altogether.
LYMAN ABBOTT
Letters to Unknown Friends
The world was made of miracles, unexpected earthquakes, storms that came from nowhere and might reshape a continent. The boy beside her. The future before her. Anything was possible.
LEIGH BARDUGO
Crooked Kingdom
A miracle is nothing more than dormant justice from another time arriving to compensate those it has cruelly abandoned.
MARK HELPRIN
Winter's Tale
A private man has always the liberty (because thought is free) to believe or not believe in his heart those acts that have been given out for miracles, according as he shall see what benefits can accrue by men's belief, to those that pretend, or countenance them, and thereby conjecture whether they be miracles or lies.
THOMAS HOBBES
Leviathan
In those parts of the world where learning and science has prevailed, miracles have ceased; but in such parts of it as are barbarous and ignorant, miracles are still in vogue; which is of itself a strong presumption that in the infancy of letters, learning and science, or in the world's non-age, those who confided in miracles, as a proof of the divine mission of the first promulgators of revelation, were imposed upon by fictitious appearances instead of miracles.
ETHAN ALLEN
Reason: The Only Oracle of Man
Miracles don't occur when I want what I haven't got or pray for neon letters in the sky. I can only perceive the miraculous by appreciating and being open to each moment. I tend, as I think many of us do, to think that miracles are only those things that bring great joy, happiness, clarity, or relief. But miracles often, at first, seem a mixed blessing at best or even quite painful.
MARILYN LANCELOT
Switching Addictions
No matter how strong we think our faith is or want it to be, we always want to know that God is there for us, and miracles are that sort of element that bridges the gap between our faith and our connection with God.
MICHAEL O'NEILL
Exploring the Miraculous
The narrowest hinge in my hand puts to scorn all machinery,
And the cow crunching with depress'd head surpasses any statue,
And a mouse is miracle enough to stagger sextillions of infidels.
WALT WHITMAN
"Song of Myself", Leaves of Grass
It must be so; for miracles are ceased
And therefore we must needs admit the means
How things are perfected.
WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE
Henry V
Miracles are propitious accidents, the natural causes of which are too complicated to be readily understood.
GEORGE SANTAYANA
introduction, The Ethics of Spinoza
You have to see the miracles for there to be miracles.
JANDY NELSON
I'll Give You the Sun
Miracles don't have to be huge and dramatic. They can be small and beautiful like flowers blooming in March, right after a snowfall. They can be a snowflake falling during a summer rain storm. It could be a lost cat finding refuge at your home.
STEPHEN J. NAPOLITANO
Bob Frost
However portentous a fact may be, or even supernatural--if such facts exist--however solemnly a miracle may be done in sight of all, the lightning of that fact, the thunderbolt of that miracle is quickly swallowed up in the ocean of life, whose surface, scarcely stirred by the brief convulsion, returns to the level of its habitual flow.
HONORÉ DE BALZAC
Seraphita
Since man cannot live without miracles, he will provide himself with miracles of his own making. He will believe in witchcraft and sorcery, even though he may otherwise be a heretic, an atheist, and a rebel.
FYODOR DOSTOYEVSKY
The Brothers Karamazov
Miracles are like small animals in the forest. Sometimes you see them, but mostly you don't.
MAXINE GAUTHIER COMBS
The Inner Life of Objects