I think of compassion as the fundamental religious experience and, unless that is there, you have nothing.

The job of an educator is to teach students to see vitality in themselves

We are kept out of the Garden by our own fear and desire in relation to what we think to be the goods of our life.

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

If you go to a master to study and learn the techniques, you diligently follow all the instructions the master puts upon you. But then comes the time for using the rules in your own way and not being bound by them....You can actually forget the rules because they have been assimilated. You are an artist. Your own innocence now is of one who has become an artist, who has been, as it were, transmuted.... You can't have creativity unless you leave behind the bounded, the fixed, all the rules.

Love is exactly as strong as life.

The Garden is a metaphor for the following: our minds, and our thinking in terms of pairs of opposites--man and woman, good and evil--are as holy as that of a god. (50)