To ensure the adoration of a theorem for any length of time, faith is not enough; a police force is needed as well.

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

On no other stage are the scenes shifted with a swiftness so like magic as on the great stage of history when once the hour strikes.

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

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

Bid me discourse, I will enchant thine ear.

Man is always a wizard to man, and the social world is at first magical.

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.

In the past, men created witches; now they create mental patients.

The most beautiful emotion we can experience is the mysterious. It is the fundamental emotion that stands at the cradle of all true art and science.

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

The subconscious is ceaselessly murmuring, and it is by listening to these murmurs that one hears the truth.

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.