To describe something as “supernatural” is simply to say that we cannot explain it within the framework of our world as we know it — that we don’t understand how it is governed by the laws of nature as we comprehend them. Yet those laws of nature, permanent and unyielding as they may seem, have been shifting and changing for hundreds of years.
Before science explained the rotation of planets and moons around the sun, an eclipse held mystical foreboding. Until the microscope revealed bacteria, we sought divine meaning in the common cold. As tempting as it may be to think that the 21st century has brought us to the pinnacle of human understanding, our explorations will no doubt continue, expanding our understanding of the world and shifting the boundary between the natural and the supernatural.
In celebration of this fact, we’ve collected the following quotes on the supernatural from some of the world’s greatest thinkers: doctors and philosophers, authors and artists. May they inspire you in your own search for what is real — and what seemingly magical force may lie just beyond what our eyes can see.
When I am writing, I do not distinguish between the natural and supernatural. Everything seems real. That is my world, you could say.
The magical, supernatural force that is with us every second is time. We can’t even comprehend it. It’s such an illusion, it’s such a strange thing.
I don’t have any premonitions. I don’t have any supernatural powers. I just have a typical woman’s intuition, and I go with that.
When you work on something that combines both the spectacular and the relatable, the hyperreal and the real, it suddenly can become supernatural. The hypothetical and the theoretical can become literal.
Real genius is nothing else but the supernatural virtue of humility in the domain of thought.
There are more things in Heaven and Earth, Horatio, than are dreamt of in your philosophy.
There is, one knows not what sweet mystery about this sea, whose gently awful stirrings seem to speak of some hidden soul beneath.
As a young man I was scornful about the supernatural but as I have got older, the sharp line that divided the credible from the incredible has tended to blur; I am aware that the whole world is slightly incredible.
I wish to confound all these people, to create a work of art of a supernatural realism and of a spiritualist naturalism. I wish to prove … that nothing is explained in the mysteries which surround us.
In the universe, there are things that are known, and things that are unknown, and in between them, there are doors.
I shall not commit the fashionable stupidity of regarding everything I cannot explain as a fraud.
But he didn’t believe in supernatural monsters. He shivered. He hoped they didn’t believe in him.
The supernatural is the natural not yet understood.
One man’s “magic” is another man’s engineering. “Supernatural” is a null word.
The ideas I had about supernatural beings came to me the same way that my mathematical ideas did. So I took them seriously.
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April Dávila
April Dávila is a lover of words. Her debut novel "142 Ostriches" was released in 2020.
