Any serious attempt to do anything worthwhile is ritualistic.

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

I shall curse you with book and bell and candle.

Disbelief in magic can force a poor soul into believing in government and business.

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

Bid me discourse, I will enchant thine ear.

Egypt was the mother of magicians.

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

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.

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

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.

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

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.