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We must be willing to get rid of the life we’ve planned, so as to have the life that is waiting for us.

All life stinks and you must embrace that with compassion.

You enter the forest at the darkest point, where there is no path. Where there is a way or path, it is someone else’s path.

Those who have heard deeply the rhythms and hymns of the gods can recite those hymns in such a way that the gods will be attracted.

The hero’s death and resurrection is a model for the casting off of the old life and moving into the new.

We’re in a freefall into future. We don’t know where we’re going. Things are changing so fast, and always when you’re going through a long tunnel, anxiety comes along. And all you have to do to transform your hell into…

Where we had thought to travel outward, we shall come to the center of our own existence. And where we had thought to be alone, we shall be with all the world.

The image of the cosmos must change with the development of the mind and knowledge; otherwise, the mythic statement is lost, and man becomes dissociated from the very basis of his own religious experience. Doubt comes in, and so forth.…

The modern hero-deed must be that of questing to bring to light again the lost Atlantis of the co-ordinated soul.

It is not only that there is no hiding place for the gods from the searching telescope and microscope; there is no such society any more as the gods once supported.

The tribal ceremonies of birth, initiation, marriage, burial, installation, and so forth, serve to translate the individual’s life-crises and life-deeds into classic, impersonal forms. They disclose him to himself, not as this personality or that, but as the warrior, the…

For when scrutinized in terms not of what it is but of how it functions, of how it has served mankind in the past, of how it may serve today, mythology shows itself to be as amenable as life itself…

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.

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. There is no separateness.

[Quoting Jean Erdman Campbell:] “The way of the mystic and the way of the artist are related, except that the mystic doesn’t have a craft.”

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…

For the symbols of mythology are not manufactured; they cannot be ordered, invented, or permanently suppressed. They are the spontaneous productions of the psyche, and each bears within it, undamaged, the germ power of its source.

And so, to return to our opening question: What is –– or what is to be –– the new mythology? It is — and will forever be, as long as our human race exists –– the old, everlasting, perennial mythology,…

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…

The goal of life is to make your heartbeat match the beat of the universe, to match your nature with Nature.

Regrets are illuminations come too late.

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…

One must remember the central truth about Easter and Passover. We are called out of the house of bondage, even as the Jews were called out of their bondage in Egypt. We are called out of bondage in the way…