Opportunities to find deeper powers within ourselves come when life seems most challenging.
The job of an educator is to teach students to see vitality in themselves.
A hero is someone who has given his or her life to something bigger than oneself.
You are the hero of your own story.
There is perhaps nothing worse than reaching the top of the ladder and discovering that you're on the wrong wall.
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?
The big problem of any young person’s life is to have models to suggest possibilities. Nietzsche says, ‘Man is the sick animal.’ Man is the animal that doesn’t know what to do with itself. The mind has many possibilities, but we can live no more than one life. What are we going to do with ourselves?
Life lives on life. This is the sense of the symbol of the Ouroboros, the serpent biting its tail. Everything that lives lives on the death of something else. Your own body will be food for something else. Anyone who denies this, anyone who holds back, is out of order. Death is an act of giving.
Full circle, from to tomb of the womb to the womb of the tomb, we come.
Where we had thought to travel outward, we will come to the center of our own existence. And where we had thought to be alone, we will be with all the world.
The old skin has to be shed before the new one can come.
The demon that you can swallow gives you its power, and the greater life’s pain, the greater life’s reply.
You know, when real trouble comes your humanity is awakened. The fundamental human experience is that of compassion.
Art is the set of wings to carry you out of your own entanglement.
No one in the world was ever you before, with your particular gifts and abilities and possibilities.
In marriage you are not sacrificing yourself to the other person. You are sacrificing yourself to the relationship.
Nothing is exciting if you know what the outcome is going to be.
I think of mythology as the homeland of the muses, the inspirers of art, the inspirers of poetry. To see life as a poem and yourself participating in a poem is what the myth does for you.
The goal of life is to make your heartbeat match the beat of the universe, to match your nature with Nature.
All we really want to do is dance.