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

Is it conceivable that mysticism is a mark of inadequate art?

Most new discoveries are suddenly-seen things that were always there. A new idea is a light that illuminates presences which simply had no form before the light fell on them.

The Past, being in the mode of memory, is closed, inalienable, and irreparable.

Philosophical questions are not by their nature insoluble. They are, indeed, radically different from scientific questions, because they concern the implications and other interrelations of ideas, not the order of physical events; their answers are interpretations instead of factual reports, and their function is to increase not our knowledge of nature, but our understanding of what we know.

Magic, then, is not a method, but a language; it is part and parcel of that greater phenomenon, ritual, which is the language of religion. Ritual is a symbolic transformation of experiences that no other medium can adequately express.

The function of art is to acquaint the beholder with something he has not known before.