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

Any serious attempt to do anything worthwhile is ritualistic.

Nothing is so easy to fake as the inner vision.

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

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

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.

The fact is certain because it is impossible.

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

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

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.

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

Superstitions are habits rather than beliefs.