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.

Men willingly believe what they wish.

Nothing worth knowing can be understood with the mind.

A miracle entails a degree of irrationality—not because it shocks reason, but because it makes no appeal to it.

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

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

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.

Nothing from nothing ever yet was born.

Once something becomes discernible, or understandable, we no longer need to repeat it. We can destroy it.

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

God is alive. Magic is afoot.

There is not so contemptible a plant or animal that does not confound the most enlarged understanding.

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