Marriage is not a love affair. A love affair has to do with immediate personal satisfaction. Marriage is an ordeal; it means yielding, time and again. That's why it's a sacrament; You give up your personal simplicity to participate in a relationship. And when you're giving, you're not giving to the other person; you're giving to the relationship.

Their task [creative artists], therefore, is to communicate directly from one inward world to another, in such a way that an actual shock of experience will have been rendered: not a mere statement for the information or persuasion of a brain, but an effective communication across the void of space and time from one center of consciousness to another.

A hero is not a champion of things become, but of things becoming; the dragon to be slain by him is precisely the monster of the status quo.

For the bliss of the deep abode is not lightly abandoned in favor of the self-scattering of the wakened state.

People say that what we're all seeking is a meaning for life. I don't think that's what we're really seeking. I think what we're seeking is an experience of being alive, so that our life experiences on the purely physical plane will have resonance within our own innermost being and reality, so that we actually feel the rapture of being alive.

In choosing your god, you choose your way of looking at the universe. There are plenty of Gods. Choose yours.

The adventure evoked a quality of his character that he didn't know he possessed.