The world cannot live at the level of its great men.

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 don’t think I’ve ever seen anything as beautiful as you.

Inside myself is a place where I live all alone, and that's where I renew my springs that never dry up. ~Pearl Buck

The main object of religion is not to get a man into heaven, but to get heaven into him.

As a matter of self-preservation, a man needs good friends or ardent enemies, for the former instruct him and the latter take him to task.

Give a man health and a course to steer, and he'll never stop to trouble about whether he's happy or not.

I threw [Picasso's] drawing on the floor and in doing so, threw away about £50m.

I have been to hell and back, and let me tell you, it was wonderful.

There is a supreme power and ruling force which pervades and rules the boundless universe. You are a part of this power

Take things always by their smooth handle.

The pure products of America go crazy--mountain folk from Kentucky or the ribbed north end of Jersey with its isolate lakes and valleys, its deaf-mutes, thieves.