Bid me discourse, I will enchant thine ear.

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.

I shall curse you with book and bell and candle.

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.

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

Superstitions are habits rather than beliefs.

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

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

Egypt was the mother of magicians.

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.

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

The fact is certain because it is impossible.

Watch with glittering eyes the whole world around you, because the greatest secrets are always hidden in the most unlikely places. Those who don’t believe in magic will never find it.