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.

Everything that deceives does so by casting a spell.

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

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

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.

Nothing is so easy as to deceive one’s self; for what we wish, that we readily believe.

Bid me discourse, I will enchant thine ear.

One thing alone not even God can do: to make undone whatever has been done.

Everything is a miracle. It is a miracle that one does not dissolve in one’s bath like a lump of sugar.

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

There are times when reality becomes too complex for oral communication. But legend gives it a form by which it pervades the whole world.

Faith is to believe what you do not see; the reward of this faith is to see what you believe.

Men willingly believe what they wish.