Words and magic were in the beginning one and the same thing, and even today words retain much of their magical power.

...our philosophy has preserved essential traits of animistic modes of thought such as the over-estimation of the magic of words and the belief that real processes in the external world follow the lines laid down by our thoughts.

Cats are magical. . .the more you pet them the longer you both live.

In his fight against the powers of the surrounding world his first weapon was magic, the first forerunner of our modern technology. We suppose that this confidence in magic is derived from the over-estimation of the individual’s own intellectual operations, from the belief in the ‘omnipotence of thoughts’, which, incidentally, we come across again in our obsessional neurotics.

The mind is like an iceberg, it floats with one-seventh of its bulk above water.

The psychical, whatever its nature may be, is itself unconscious.