Egypt was the mother of magicians.

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

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

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

Men willingly believe what they wish.

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.

Nothing is so easy to fake as the inner vision.

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

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

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

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.

God is alive. Magic is afoot.

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