No one in the world was ever you before, with your particular gifts and abilities and possibilities.

Myth must be kept alive. The people who can keep it alive are the artists of one kind or another.

The goal is to live with God like composure on the full rush of energy, like Dionysus riding the leopard, without being torn to pieces.

Anyone who has had an experience of mystery knows that there is a dimension of the universe that is not that which is available to his senses. There is a pertinent saying in one of the Upanishads: When before the beauty of a sunset or of a mountain you pause and exclaim, ‘Ah,’ you are participating in divinity. Such a moment of participation involves a realization of the wonder and sheer beauty of existence. People living in the world of nature experience such moments every day. They live in the recognition of something there that is much greater than the human dimension.

[Comedies], in the ancient world, were regarded as of a higher rank than tragedy, of a deeper truth, of a more difficult realization, of a sounder structure, and of a revelation more complete. 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. ...Tragedy is the shattering of the forms and of our attachment to the forms...

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

The dark night of the soul comes just before revelation.