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 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.

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.

The moral world is as little exempt as the physical world from the law of ceaseless change, of perpetual flux.

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

Some of the old laws of Israel are clearly savage taboos of a familiar type thinly disguised as commands of the Deity.

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.