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

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

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?

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.

Appearances often are deceiving.

Nothing from nothing ever yet was born.

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

Men willingly believe what they wish.

Superstitions are habits rather than beliefs.

Any serious attempt to do anything worthwhile is ritualistic.

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.

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.