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 from nothing ever yet was born.

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.

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

On no other stage are the scenes shifted with a swiftness so like magic as on the great stage of history when once the hour strikes.

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

Many are the wonders of the world, and none so wonderful as man.

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

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

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

The subconscious is ceaselessly murmuring, and it is by listening to these murmurs that one hears the truth.

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.

I shall curse you with book and bell and candle.