He must put aside his pride, his virtue, beauty and life and bow or submit to the absolutely intolerable.

Wherever the poetry of myth is interpreted as biography, history, or science, it is killed.

How teach again, however, what has been taught correctly and incorrectly learned a thousand thousand times, throughout the millenniums of mankind's prudent folly? That is the hero's ultimate difficult task.

Regrets are illuminations come too late.

If you realize what the real problem is-losing yourself-you realize that this itself is the ultimate trial.

One of the great disadvantages of a literary or scriptural tradition like the biblical one is that a deity or context of deities becomes crystallized, petrified at a certain time and place. The deity doesn’t continue to grow, expand, or take into account new cultural forces and new realizations in the sciences, and the result is this make-believe conflict we have in our culture between science and religion.

The function of (heroic) symbols is to give you a sense of Aha! Yes, I know what it is, it's myself.