Even the recognition of an individual whom we see every day is only possible as the result of an abstract idea of him formed by generalization from his appearances in the past.

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.

I have lived a thousand lives and I’ve loved a thousand loves. I’ve walked on distant worlds and seen the end of time. Because I read.

Ideas are the seeds of invention and actions are the fertilizers.

When the world careens out of control, we can rest in the fact that God spun this world with a simple word. Matter from emptiness. Beauty from void. Community from chaos.

The spirits of the dead are not among us to entertain us... Assuming the revenants you encounter have simply signed up to play haunted house for the amusement of the living is just plain ignorant.

If you get to a point where something happens today to stress you out, take a breath & center your thoughts on peace. Ignored thoughts die.

Mankind is a great, an immense family... This is proved by what we feel in our hearts at Christmas.

I'm always fascinated with how a person becomes a good quality person, a productive person, and how it happened to me, because I was a terror.

I travel a fair amount, read on the plane, and I read fast.

Here's the question I would ask you to consider; do you treat yourself the way you want other people to treat you?

The longest road trip I've ever been on is from Minnesota to Los Angeles.