Indeed the influence of music on the development of religion is a subject which would repay a sympathetic study.

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.

Something has got to hold it together. I'm saying my prayers to Elmer, the Greek god of glue.

That Edison or Lincoln could have been Edison or Lincoln after four years of Harvard is improbable.

Well I'm not a novelist. I've only written one book and that is a memoir.

The way to judge a good hand is that the fingers are the same size at the tip as where they come out of the hand itself.

When my first child was born in 1962, I wrote a letter to my grandfather telling him how happy I was but how concerned; concerned because there were so many visions which were not very good.

There are rules but there's really no wrong way.

Why is everyone telling me to do it? I already did it.

Virtue is not to be considered in the light of mere innocence, or abstaining from harm; but as the exertion of our faculties in doing good.

You can't wait around for destiny to give you what you think you deserve, you have to earn it, even if you think you've paid your dues.