The believer in magic and miracles reflects on how to impose a law on nature—and, in brief, the religious cult is the outcome of this reflection.

Have you ever, looking up, seen a cloud like to a centaur, a leopard, a wolf, or a bull?

The Mughal’s nature is such that they demand miracles, but if a miracle were to be performed by some upright follower of our religion, they would say that it had been brought about by magic and sorcery. They would strike him down with spears or would stone him to death.

Many are the wonders of the world, and none so wonderful as man.

The fear of the Lord is true wisdom, and he who hath it not can in no way penetrate the true secrets of magic.

There is nothing that man fears more than the touch of the unknown. He wants to see what is reaching toward him and to be able to recognize or at least classify it. Man always tends to avoid physical contact with anything strange.

All things are filled full of signs, and it is a wise man who can learn about one thing from another.

Nothing worth knowing can be understood with the mind.

The more enlightened our houses are, the more their walls ooze ghosts.

To blow and to swallow at the same time is not easy; I cannot at the same time be here and also there.

Curses are like young chickens, they always come home to roost.

In the society of men, the truth resides now less in what things are than in what they are not. Our social realities are so ugly if seen in the light of exiled truth, and beauty is almost no longer possible if it is not a lie.

The mind is led on, step by step, to defeat its own logic.