Quote collection
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"How teach again, however, what has been taught correctly and incorrectly learned a thousand thousand times, throughout the millenniums of mankind's prudent folly? That is the hero's ultimate difficult task."
"We need myths that will identify the individual not with his local group but with the planet."
"No tribal rite has yet been recorded which attempts to keep winter from descending; on the contrary: the rites all prepare the community to endure, together with the rest of nature, the season of the terrible cold."
"In choosing your god, you choose your way of looking at the universe. There are plenty of Gods. Choose yours."
"Heinrich Zimmerhe had a little saying : The best things cant be told - because they are transcendent, inexpressible truths. The second best are misunderstood : myths, which are metaphoric attempts to point to the way toward the first. And the third best have to do with history, science, biography, and so on. The only kind of talking that can be understood is this last kind."
"If there were already a path, it would have to be someone else's; the whole point is to find your own way."
"The perfect human being is uninteresting."
"The object becomes aesthetically significant when it becomes metaphysically significant."
"Preachers err by trying to talk people into belief; better they reveal the radiance of their own discovery."
"I think it's important to live life with a knowledge of its mystery, and of your own mystery."
"Hell is life drying up."
"Our life evokes our character. You find out more about yourself as you go on. That's why it's good to put yourself in situations that will evoke your higher nature rather than your lower."
"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. The objective world remains what it was, but, because of a shift of emphasis within the subject, is beheld as though transformed. Where formerly life and death contended, now enduring being is made manifest-as indifferent to the accidents of time as water boiling in a pot is to the destiny of a bubble, or as the cosmos to the appearance and disappearance of a galaxy of stars."
"Typically, the hero of the fairy tale achieves a domestic, microcosmic triumph, and the hero of myth a world-historica l, macrocosmic triumph. Whereas the former-the youngest or despised child who becomes the master of extraordinary powers-prevails over his personal oppressors, the latter brings back from his adventure the means for the regeneration of his society as a whole."
"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."
"The essence of oneself and the essence of the world: these two are one. [ The aim is not to see, but to realize that one is, that essence; then one is free to wander as that essence in the world.] Hence separateness, withdrawal, is no longer necessary. Wherever the hero may wander, whatever he may do, he is ever in the presence of his own essence-for he has the perfected eye to see."
"What is a god? A god is a personification of a motivating power of a value system that functions in human life and in the universe."
"Apocalypse does not point to a fiery Armageddon but to the fact that our ignorance and our complacency are coming to an end."
"There is no greater privilege in life than being yourself."
"The departure from the world is regarded not as a fault, but as the first step into that noble path at the remotest turn of which illumination is to be won."