"If you do follow your bliss you put yourself on a kind of track that has been there all the while, waiting for you, and the life that you ought to be living is the one you are living. Follow your bliss and don't be afraid, and doors will open where you didn't know they were going to be."

"Opportunities to find deeper powers within ourselves come when life seems most challenging."

"The only way you can talk about this great tide in which you're a participant is as Schopenhauer did: the universe is a dream dreamed by a single dreamer where all the dream characters dream too."

"Myth is much more important and true than history. History is just journalism and you know how reliable that is."

"When people get married because they think it's a long-time love affair, they'll be divorced very soon, because all love affairs end in disappointment. But marriage is a recognition of a spiritual identity."

"It has always been the prime function of mythology and rite to supply the symbols that carry the human spirit forward, in counteraction to those that tend to tie it back."

"The first function of mythology is showing everything as a metaphor to transcendence."

"Sit in a room and read--and read and read. And read the right books by the right people. Your mind is brought onto that level, and you have a nice, mild, slow-burning rapture all the time."

"Your life is the fruit of your own doing. You have no one to blame but yourself."

"It is only when a man tames his own demons that he becomes the king of himself if not of the world."

"How to teach again what has been taught correctly it incorrectly 1000 thousand times, throughout the millenniums of mankind's prudent folly? That is the hero's ultimate difficult task. How to render back into light-world language the speech-defying pronouncements of the dark? Many failures attest to the difficulties of this life-affirmative threshold."

"The cave you fear to enter holds the treasure you seek."

"It is by going down into the abyss that we recover the treasures of life. Where you stumble, there lies your treasure."

"When you are on your path, and it is truly your path, doors will open for you where there were no doors for someone else."

"How to get rid of ego as dictator and turn it into messenger and servant and scout, to be in your service, is the trick."

"Comedies, in the ancient world, were regarded as of a higher rank than tragedy, of a deeper truth, of a more difficult realization, of a sounder structure, and of a revelation more complete. The happy ending of the fairy tale, the myth, and the divine comedy of the soul, is to be read, not as a contradiction, but as a transcendence of the universal tragedy of man.... Tragedy is the shattering of the forms and of our attachments to the forms; comedy, the wild and careless, inexhaustible joy of life invincible."

"Furthermore, we have not even to risk the adventure alone; for the heroes of all time have gone before us; the labyrinth is thoroughlyknown; we have only to follow the thread of the heropath. And where we had thought to find an abomination, we shall find a god; where we had thought to slay another, we shall slay ourselves; where we had thought to travel outward, weshall come to the center of our own existence; where we had thought to be alone, we shall be with all the world."

"Mythology is composed by poets out of their insights and realizations. Mythologies are not invented they are found. You can no more tell us what your dream is going to be tonight than we can invent a myth. Myths come from the mystical region of essential experience."

"Love is a friendship set to music."

"What each must seek in his life never was on land or sea. It is something out of his own unique potentiality for experience, something that never has been and never could have been experienced by anyone else."

"Myth is what we call other people's religion."

"You must give up the life you planned in order to have the life that is waiting for you."

"The problem in our society and in our schools is to inclulcate, without overdoing it, the notion of education, as in the Latin educere--to lead, to bring out what is in someone rather than merely to indoctrinate him/her from the outside."

"One thing that comes out in myths is that at the bottom of the abyss comes the voice of salvation. The black moment is the moment when the real message of transformation is going to come. At the darkest moment comes the light."

"You have to learn to recognize your own depths."

"In marriage you are not sacrificing yourself to the other person. You are sacrificing yourself to the relationship. You become mature when you become the authority of your own life.Life will always be sorrowful. We can't change it, but we can change our attitude toward it.Awe is what moves us forward."

"When you translate the Bible with excessive literalism, you demythologize it. The possibility of a convincing reference to the individual's own spiritual experience is lost."

"People have the notion of saving the world by shifting things around, changing the rules, and who's on top, and so forth. No, no! Any world is a valid world if it's alive. The thing to do is to bring life to it, and the only way to do that is to find in your own case where the life is and become alive yourself."

"All religions are true but none are literal."

"Writer's block results from too much head. Cut off your head. Pegasus, poetry, was born of Medusa when her head was cut off. You have to be reckless when writing. Be as crazy as your conscience allows."

"It may be a species of impudence to think that the way you understand God is the way God is. (60)."

"With the moon walk, the religious myth that sustained these notions could no longer be held. With our view of earthrise, we could see that the earth and the heavens were no longer divided but that the earth is in the heavens."

"Now I found it in writing sentences. You can write that sentence in a way that you would have written it last year. Or you can write it in the way of the exquisite nuance that is sriting in your mind now. But that takes a lot of ... waiting for the right word to come."

"A hero is someone who has given his or her life to something bigger than oneself."

"A priest is a functionary of a social sort. The society worships certain deities in a certain way, and the priest becomes ordained as a functionary to carry out that ritual. The deity to whom he is devoted is a deity that was there before he came along. But the shaman's powers are symbolized in his own familiars, deities of his own personal experience. His authority comes out of a psychological experience, not a social ordination."

"One way or another, we all have to find what best fosters the flowering of our humanity in this contemporary life, and dedicate ourselves to that."

"In America we have people from all kinds of backgrounds, all in a cluster, together, and consequently law has become very important in this country. Lawyers and law are what hold us together. There is no ethos."

"The myth is not my own, I have it from my mother."

"A ritual is the enactment of a myth. And, by participating in the ritual, you are participating in the myth. And since myth is a projection of the depth wisdom of the psyche, by participating in a ritual, participating in the myth, you are being, as it were, put in accord with that wisdom, which is the wisdom that is inherent within you anyhow. Your consciousness is being re-minded of the wisdom of your own life. I think ritual is terribly important."

"Every moment is utterly unique and will not be continued in eternity. This fact gives life its poignancy and should concentrate your attention on what you are experiencing now."

"Humor is the touchstone of the truly mythological as distinct from the more literal-minded and sentimental theological mood."