Life is like arriving late for a movie, having to figure out what was going on without bothering everybody with a lot of questions, and then being unexpectedly called away before you find out how it ends.

If you want to find out what it means to have a society without any rituals, read the New York Times.

The ultimate dragon is within you, it is your ego clamping you down.

This, I believe, is the great Western truth: that each of us is a completely unique creature and that, if we are ever to give any gift to the world, it will have to come out of our own experience and fulfillment of our own potentialities, not someone else's.

This is all I ever wanted - to help students and artists see myth as a reflection of the one sublime adventure of life, and then to breathe new life into it.

You know the rule: If you are falling, dive. Do the thing that has to be done.

But the makers of legend have seldom rested content to regard the world's great heroes as mere human beings who broke past the horizons that limited their fellows and returned such boons as any man with equal faith and courage might have found.