"Wherever the poetry of myth is interpreted as biography, history or science, it is killed."

"Follow your bliss. Find where it is and don't be afraid to follow it."

"When you have lived your individual life in your own adventurous way and then look back upon its course, you will find that you have lived a model human life, after all."

"A myth is something that has never happened, but is happening all the time."

"A hero ventures forth from the worldof common day into a region ofsupernatural wonder. Fabulous forcesare there encountered and a decisivevictory is won."

"The experience of mystery comes not from expecting it but through yielding all your programs, because your programs are based on fear and desire. Drop them and the radiance comes."

"You can get a lot of work done if you stay with it and are excited and its play instead of work."

"Find a place inside where there's joy, and the joy will burn out the pain."

"Every religion is true one way or another. It is true when understood metaphorically. But when it gets stuck in its own metaphors, interpreting them as facts, then you are in trouble."

"The demon that you can swallow gives you its power, and the greater life's pain, the greater life's reply."

"The psychotic drowns in the same waters in which the mystic swims with delight."

"When you realize that eternity is right here now, that it is within your possibility to experience the eternity of your own truth and being, then you grasp the following: That which you are was never born and will never die."

"Mythology is not a lie, mythology is poetry, it is metaphorical. It has been well said that mythology is the penultimate truth--penultimate because the ultimate cannot be put into words. It is beyond words. Beyond images, beyond that bounding rim of the Buddhist Wheel of Becoming. Mythology pitches the mind beyond that rim, to what can be known but not told."

"Poets are simply those who have made a profession ans a lifestyle of being in touch with their bliss."

"When we quit thinking primarily about ourselves and our own self-preservation, we undergo a truly heroic transformation of consciousness."

"If the path before you is clear, you're probably on someone else's."

"Heresy is the life of a mythology and orthodoxy is the death."

"Passion makes most psychiatrists nervous."

"The imitation of Christ is the joyful participation in the sorrows of the world."

"The ego is as you think of yourself. You in relation to all the commitments of your life, as you understand them. The self is the whole range of possibilities that you've never even thought of. And you're stuck with you're past when you're stuck with the ego. Because if all you know about yourself is what you found out about yourself, well, that already happened. The self is a whole field of potentialities to come through."

"I think the person who takes a job in order to live - that is to say, for the money - has turned himself into a slave."

"Every act has both good and evil results. Every act in life yields pairs of opposites in its results. The best we can do is lean toward the light, toward the harmonious relationships that come from compassion with suffering, from understanding the other person."

"When the Buddha declares there is escape from sorrow, the escape is Nirvana, which is not a place, like heaven, but a psychological state of mind in which you are are released from desire and fear. And your life becomes harmonious, centered and affirmative. Even with suffering. The Buddhists speak of the bodhisattva - the one who knows immortality, yet voluntarily enters into the field of the fragmentation of time and participates willingly and joyfully in the sorrows of the world."

"Life will always be sorrowful. We can't change it, but we can change our attitude toward it."

"You don't ask what a dance means. You enjoy it. You don't ask what the world means. You enjoy it. You don't ask what you mean. You enjoy it."

"God is a metaphor for that which trancends all levels of intellectual thought. It's as simple as that."

"The fundamental human experience is that of compassion."

"Marriage . . . is not a love affair, it is an ordeal."

"One great thing about growing old is that nothing is going to lead to anything. Everything is of the moment."

"Half the people in the world think that the metaphors of their religious traditions, for example, are facts. And the other half contends that they are not facts at all. As a result we have people who consider themselves believers because they accept metaphors as facts, and we have others who classify themselves as atheists because they think religious metaphors are lies."

"The fates lead him who will, him who won't they drag."

"Mythology may, in a real sense, be defined as other people's religion. And religion may, in a sense, be understood as popular misunderstanding of mythology."

"If you want to change the world, change the metaphor."

"Shakespeare said that art is a mirror held up to nature. And that's what it is. The nature is your nature, and all of these wonderful poetic images of mythology are referring to something in you. When your mind is trapped by the image out there so that you never make the reference to yourself, you have misread the image.The inner world is the world of your requirements and your energies and your structure and your possibilities that meets the outer world. And the outer world is the field of your incarnation. That's where you are. You've got to keep both going. As Novalis said, 'The seat of the soul is there where the inner and outer worlds meet."

"People say that what we're all seeking is a meaning for life. I don't think that's what we're really seeking. I think that what we're seeking is an experience of being alive, so that our life experiences on the purely physical plane will have resonances with our own innermost being and reality, so that we actually feel the rapture of being alive."

"Mythology is to relate found truth to the living of a life."

"We must be willing to let go of the life we planned so as to have the life that is waiting for us."

"The Garden is a metaphor for the following: our minds, and our thinking in terms of pairs of opposites--man and woman, good and evil--are as holy as that of a god."

"We must let go of the life we have planned, so as to accept the one that is waiting for us."

"A mythological image that has to be explained to the brain is not working."

"I don't have to have faith, I have experience."

"You enter the forestat the darkest point,where there is no path.Where there is a way or path,it is someone else's path.You are not on your own path.If you follow someone else's way,you are not going to realizeyour potential."

"Society has provided [children] no rituals by which they become members of the tribe, of the community. All children need to be twice born, to learn to function rationally in the present world, leaving childhood behind."

"Life is without meaning. You bring the meaning to it. The meaning of life is whatever you ascribe it to be. Being alive is the meaning."

"What we're learning in our schools is not the wisdom of life. We're learning technologies, we're getting information. There's a curious reluctance on the part of faculties to indicate the life values of their subjects."

"When you make the sacrifice in marriage, you're sacrificing not to each other but to unity in a relationship."

"Our life evokes our character. You find out more about yourself as you go on. That's why it's good to be able to put yourself in situations that will evoke your higher nature rather than your lower."

"There seem to be only two kinds of people: Those who think that metaphors are facts, and those who know that they are not facts. Those who know they are not facts are what we call "atheists," and those who think they are facts are "religious." Which group really gets the message?"

"The job of an educator is to teach students to see vitality in themselves."

"When you don't have a job (requiring reading) and you are doing your own reading you've got deep psychological questions. As deep as those of a little boy."