The fairytale is irresponsible; it is frankly imaginary, and its purpose is to gratify wishes, as a dream doth flatter.

Philosophizing is a process of making sense out of experience.

Religion, even the most primitive and superstitious, is inevitably a beginning of culture. It is not possible without some kind of symbolic expression ... and begets dramatic gesture, dance, and chant.

The intellectual treatment of any datum, any experience, any subject, is determined by the nature of our questions, and only carried out in the answers.

The power of magic has no known limits. A person knows, in a fair way, his own physical capacities, the weight of the blows he can deal, the furthest range of his arrows, the strength of his voice, the speed and endurance of his running; but the reaches of his mind are indefinite and, to his feeling, infinite.

Ritual is the most primitive reflection of serious thought, a slow deposit, as it were, of people's imaginative insight into life.

Only a creature that can think symbolically about life can conceive of its own death. Our knowledge of death is part of our knowledge of life.