By religion, then, I understand a propitiation or conciliation of powers superior to man which are believed to direct and control the course of nature and of human life.

The custom of burning a beneficent god is too foreign to later modes of thought to escape misinterpretation.

Small minds cannot grasp great ideas; to their narrow comprehension, their purblind vision, nothing seems really great and important but themselves.

The second principle of magic: things which have once been in contact with each other continue to act on each other at a distance after the physical contact has been severed.

The advance of knowledge is an infinite progression towards a goal that ever recedes.

In point of fact magicians appear to have often developed into chiefs and kings.

It is a common rule with primitive people not to waken a sleeper, because his soul is away and might not have time to get back.

The question whether our conscious personality survives after death has been answered by almost all races of men in the affirmative.

The slow, the never ending approach to truth consists in perpetually forming and testing hypotheses, accepting those at which at the time seem to fit the facts and rejecting the others.

The man of science, like the man of letters, is too apt to view mankind only in the abstract, selecting in his consideration only a single side of our complex and many-sided being.

Man has created gods in his own likeness and being himself mortal he has naturally supposed his creatures to be in the same sad predicament.

Art isn't a product. It's an experience

Healthy people live with their world.

We have never been so rich in books. But there has never been a generation when there is so much twaddle in print for children.

Humans are inscrutable. Infinitely unpredictable. This is what makes them dangerous.

Sometimes you might be a fan of bands but you don't know where they're from.

It is important to bear in mind the now commonly accepted fact that in its primitive stages, religion had nothing to do with morals as understood by us today.

The transition from the defensive to the offensive is one of the most delicate operations in war.

Take what you want, and pay for it.

Can the Lord forgive me? Got the spirit of a thug in me.