Mike Opferman

“As modern science emerged, it did not banish the concept of occult forces; rather, it accommodated and formalized those that seemed useful, such as magnetism and gravity, relegating others--ghosts, telepathy, telekinesis, and so on--to a ragbag of outmoded notions that, in retaining the label "occult," gradually rendered the word disreputable. But without this belief in the occult, science would have been stymied. Before Renaissance magic stimulated a new interest in the occult, the forces of nature were dismissed as beyond man's capacity to understand. To Thomas Aquinas, magnetism is an "occult virtue which man is not capable of explaining.”
― Philip Ball, The Devil's Doctor: Paracelsus and the World of Renaissance Magic and Science

“By degrees, however, he fashioned for himself out of this tendency a philosophy that was actually serviceable to life. He gained strength through familiarity with the thought that the emergency exit stood always open, and became curious, too, to taste his suffering to the dregs. If it went too badly with him he could feel sometimes with a grim malicious pleasure: "I am curious to see all the same just how much a man can endure. If the limit of what is bearable is reached, I have only to open the door to escape.”
― Hermann Hesse, Steppenwolf

“Tragedy was foresworn, in ritual denial of the ripe knowledge that we are drawing away from one another, that we share only one thing, share the fear of belonging to another, or to others, or to God; love or money, tender equated in advertising and the world, where only money is currency, and under dead trees and brittle ornaments prehensile hands exchange forgeries of what the heart dare not surrender.”
― William Gaddis, The Recognitions

“The laws of physics apply to everything equally, to stars as well as flowers. Botany and astronomy are separate sciences, but if they are somehow fundamentally inconsistent then there is something wrong with our theories. The need for such an all-encompassing vision was not really felt in the Classical past. Aristotle wrote very widely and was happy enough to draw analogies between disparate phenomena, but he was conspicuously silent on some topics (such as what we would now call chemistry) and gives little impression of the need for congruence and continuity. For encyclopedists such as Pliny, "local" explanations for things were often enough: phenomena are explained largely in terms of themselves, not in terms of other things. Where do the four humors, the bodily fluids that were thought to govern health, come from? Neither Galen nor Hippocrates, the two preeminent physicians of antiquity, tell us; they assume that it is just how things are.”
― Philip Ball, The Devil's Doctor: Paracelsus and the World of Renaissance Magic and Science