Time & Perspective Quote by Sarah Bernhardt

Bernhardt turns the cosmopolitan brag into a sly self-indictment: travel is supposed to broaden the mind, yet here it’s a shopping spree for irrationality. The joke lands because it’s delivered like a collector’s triumph - “added to my stock” - as if superstition were a commodity, a set of souvenirs you can catalogue and deploy. That businesslike phrasing is the trap. It frames belief as accumulation, not enlightenment, and exposes how easily sophistication can coexist with magical thinking.

The “armed legions” image does the real work. Superstitions don’t merely haunt her; they mobilize, argue, take sides. In a critical moment - the audition, the premiere, the lover’s decision, the doctor’s verdict - the mind becomes a theater packed with competing rituals and omens. Bernhardt, the great actress, casts herself as both director and besieged protagonist, surrounded by a chorus of imported anxieties. It’s funny, but it’s also psychologically exact: when stakes spike, reason often retreats and the brain reaches for scripts that promise control.

Context matters. Bernhardt was a global celebrity in an era when modernity (science, trains, telegraphs) was accelerating while spiritualism and folk belief still thrived in the salons. As a performer whose livelihood depended on contingency - health, audience mood, a fickle press - superstition isn’t quaint; it’s a coping technology. Her line doesn’t mock “other countries” so much as it mocks the idea that any of us can travel beyond our need for talismans.