“The believer in magic and miracles reflects on how to impose a law on nature--: and, in brief, the religious cult is the outcome of this reflection.”

“Women have served all these centuries as looking glasses possessing the magic and delicious power of reflecting the figure of man at twice its natural size.”

“How else do you explain a bunch of nature-loving, uniform-wearing, possibly-magic head cases who believe in royal clans and shack up in the middle of Rocky Mountain nowhere?  Pretty much screams ‘cult’ to me.”

“Nature reflects the moods of the wizard.”

“i was becoming a sack of vomit and fecal matter. i suppose, on reflection, that that is what i had always been, but nature had not formerly imposed this aspect of the human condition quite so vividly upon me.”

“the scientist's religious feeling takes the form of a rapturous amazement at the harmony of natural law, which reveals an intelligence of such superiority that, compared with it, all the systematic thinking and acting of human beings is utterly insignificant reflection. This feeling is the guiding principle of his life and work, in so far as he succeeds in keeping himself from the shackles of selfish desire. It is beyond question closely akin to that which has possessed the religious geniuses of all ages.”