When we talk about settling the world's problems, we're barking up the wrong tree. The world is perfect. It's a mess. It has always been a mess. We're not going to change it. Our job is to straighten out our own lives.

All societies are evil, sorrowful, inequitable; and so they will always be. So if you really want to help this world, what you will have to teach is how to live in it. And that no one can do who has not himself learned how to live in it in the joyful sorrow and sorrowful joy of the knowledge of life as it is.

In marriage you are not sacrificing yourself to the other person. You are sacrificing yourself to the relationship.

The call to adventure is the point in a person’s life when they are first given notice that everything is going to change, whether they know it or not.

People who don't have a concept of the whole can do very unfortunate things.

If you want to see what a society really believes in, look at what the biggest buildings on the horizon are dedicated to.

There are mythologies that are scattered, broken up, all around us. We stand on what I call a terminal moraine of shattered mythic systems that once structured society. They can be detected all around us. You can select any of these fragments that activate your imagination for your own use. Let it help shape your own relationship to the unconscious system out of which these symbols have come.