Love is the burning point of life, and since all life is sorrowful, so is love. The stronger the love, the more the pain. Love itself is pain, you might say -the pain of being truly alive.

If you want to understand what's most important to a society, don't examine its art or literature, simply look at its biggest buildings.

When we follow our bliss, we are met by a thousand unseen helping hands.

The myth is the public domain and the dream is the private myth. If your private myth, your dream, happens to coincide with that of the society, you are in good accord with your group. If it isn't, you've got a long adventure in the dark forest ahead of you.

If a person does not listen to the demands of their own spiritual and heart life and insists on a certain program, you're going to have a schizophrenic crackup. The person has put themselves off center. They have aligned themselves with a programmatic life and it's not the one the body is interested in at all.

One can experience an unconditional affirmation of life only when one has accepted death, not as contrary to life, but as an aspect of it.

Without passion, men are not willing to pay any price or bear any burden to set the captives free.

Questing... is not an ego trip; it is an adventure to bring into fulfillment your gift to the world, which is yourself.

At such moments, you realize that you and the other are, in fact, one. It's a big realization. Survival is the second law of life. The first is that we are all one.

There's nothing you can do that's more important than being fulfilled. You become a sign, you become a signal, transparent to transcendence; in this way, you will find, live, and become a realization of your own personal myth.

We keep thinking of deity as a kind of fact, somewhere; God as a fact. God is simply our own notion of something that is symbolic of transcendence and mystery. The mystery is what's important.

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

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

If you live with the myths in your mind, you will find yourself always in mythological situations. They cover everything that can happen to you. And that enables you to interpret the myth in relation to life, as well as life in relation to myth.

When before the beauty of a sunset or a mountain, you pause and exclaim, 'Ah,' you are participating in divinity.

The Greeks, it will be recalled, regarded Eros, the god of love, as the eldest of the gods; but also as the youngest, born fresh and dewy-eyed in every living heart.

Passion will move men beyond themselves, beyond their shortcomings, beyond their failures.

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

The function of ritual, as I understand it, is to give form to human life, not in the way of a mere surface arrangement, but in depth.

To find your own way is to follow your bliss.