Wand Quotes (3 quotes)
A magician of old waved a wand that he might banish disease, a physician to-day peers through a microscope to detect the bacillus of that disease and plan its defeat. The belief in miracles was premature, that is all; it was based on dreams now coming true.
From chapter 'Jottings from a Note-book', in Canadian Stories (1918), 176.
The plough is to the farmer what the wand is to the sorcerer. Its effect is really like sorcery.
Jefferson to Charles Willson Peale, Monticello (17 Apr 1813). Epigraph in Edwin Morris Betts (ed.) Thomas Jefferson's Farm Book (1953), 47.
What now, dear reader, shall we make of our telescope? Shall we make a Mercury’s magic wand to cross the liquid aether with, and like Lucian lead a colony to the uninhabitied evening star, allured by the sweetness of the place?
In Preface to Dioptrics (1611), 86. Collected in Galileo Galilei, Johannes Kepler and Edward Stafford Carlos (trans.), The Sidereal Messenger of Galileo Galilei: And a Part of the Preface to Kepler’s Dioptrics (1880), 103.