And so every one of us shares the supreme ordeal – carries the cross of the redeemer – not in the bright moments of his tribe’s great victories, but in the silences of his personal despair.
The fundamental human experience is that of compassion.
Our actual ultimate root is in our humanity, not in our personal genealogy.
It has always been the prime function of mythology and rite to supply the symbols that carry the human spirit forward, in counteraction to those that tend to tie it back.
The only way you can talk about this great tide in which you’re a participant is as Schopenhauer did: the universe is a dream dreamed by a single dreamer where all the dream characters dream too.
In the older view the goddess Universe was alive, herself organically the Earth, the horizon, and the heavens. Now she is dead, and the universe is not an organism, but a building, with gods at rest in it in luxury: not as personifications of the energies in their manners of operation, but as luxury tenants, requiring service. And Man, accordingly, is not as a child born to flower in the knowledge of his own eternal portion but as a robot fashioned to serve.
Everything, all the time, is causing everything else.
Passion makes most psychiatrists nervous.
The secret cause of all suffering,” he said, “is mortality itself, which is the prime condition of life. It cannot be denied if life is to be affirmed.
You don’t understand death, you learn to acquiesce in death.
When you have lived your individual life in your own adventurous way and then look back upon its course, you will find that you have lived a model human life, after all.
The problem in middle life, when the body has reached its climax of power and begins to decline, is to identify yourself not with the body, which is falling away, but with the consciousness of which it is a vehicle. This is something I learned from myths.
It is a basic idea of practically every war mythology that the enemy is a monster and that in killing him one is protecting the only truly valuable order of human life on earth, which is that, of course, of one’s own people.
A myth is something that has never happened, but is happening all the time.
It’s important to live life with the experience, and therefore the knowledge, of its mystery and of your own mystery. This gives life a new radiance, a new harmony, a new splendor.
I will participate in the game. It is a wonderful, wonderful opera – except that it hurts.
Reading what you want, and having one book lead to the next, is the way I found my discipline.
Only birth can conquer death – the birth, not of the old thing again, but of something new .
Vegetarianism is the first turning away from life, because life lives on lives. Vegetarians are just eating something that can’t run away.
You should be willing to be eaten also. You are food body.