If you will think of ourselves as coming out of the earth, rather than having been thrown in here from somewhere else, you see that we are the earth, we are the consciousness of the earth. These are the eyes of the Earth. And this is the voice of the earth.

It is not society which is to guide and save the creative hero, but precisely the reverse.

There seem to be only two kinds of people: Those who think that metaphors are facts, and those who know that they are not facts. Those who know they are not facts are what we call "atheists," and those who think they are facts are "religious." Which group really gets the message?

For those in whom a local mythology still works, there is an experience both of accord with the social order, and of harmony with the universe. For those, however, in whom the authorized signs no longer work-or, if working, produce deviant effects-there follows inevitably a sense both of dissociation from the local social nexus and of quest, within and without, for life, which the brain will take to be for 'meaning'.

The perfect human being is uninteresting-the Buddha who leaves the world, you know. It is the imperfections of life that are lovable.

Myth is the secret opening through which the inexhaustible energies of the cosmos pour into human manifestation.

A one sentence definition of mythology? Mythology is what we call someone else's religion.