“[… The] woman is life, and the man is the servant of life”

(108).

“What is a marriage? The myth tells you what it is.

It’s the reunion of the separated duad” (5).

“A serpent flows like water and so is watery, but its tongue continually flashes fire. So

you have the pair of opposites together in the serpent” (54).

“You yourself are participating in the evil, or you are not alive.

Whatever you do is evil for somebody” (80).

“The center of the world is the axis mundi, the central point,

the pole around which all revolves. The central point of the world is the point where stillness and movement are together. Movement is time,

but stillness is eternity” (111).

“The boy does not have [an initiation into manhood by

Nature], so he has to be turned into a man and voluntarily

become a servant of something greater than

himself” (104).

“Everything in the field of time is dual: past and future, dead

and alive, being and nonbeing” (82).

“And what is a woman? A woman is a vehicle of life. […] She is identical with the earth goddess in her powers, and she has got to realize that

about herself” (104).

“A ritual is the enactment of a myth. By participating in a ritual, you are participating

in a myth” (103).

“The bird is the incarnation principle of the deity” (33).

“The myths and rites were means of putting the mind in accord with the body and the way of life in accord with the

way that nature dictates” (87).

“‘[Life] is a wonderful, wonderful opera —

except that it hurts’” (81).

“All children need to be twice born, to learn to function

rationally in the present world, leaving childhood behind” (9).

“Man lives by killing, and there is a sense of guilt connected with that. […] The animals that I have killed must also

survive” (90).

“[… All] myths have dealt with […] the maturation of the

individual, from dependency through adulthood, through

maturity, and then to the exit; and then how to relate to this society and how to relate this society to the world of nature

and the cosmos” (41).

“The Garden of Eden is a metaphor for that innocence

that is innocent of time, innocent of opposites, and that

is the prime center out of which consciousness then

becomes aware of the changes” (59).

“[… The] folktale is for entertainment. The myth is for

spiritual instruction” (71).

“[Gods] are magnified dreams, and dreams are manifestations in image form of the energies

of the body in conflict with each other” (46).

“There is more reality in an image than a word” (74).

“There is a basic mythological motif that originally all was

one, and then there was separation — heaven and

earth, male and female, and so forth” (62).

“All of life is meditation, most of it unintentional” (19).

“Heaven and hell are within us, and all the gods are within us”

(46).

“The reconciliation of mind to the conditions of life is

fundamental to all creation stories” (50).

“What we’re learning in schools is not the

wisdom of life” (11).

“[… The] function of ritual is to pitch you out [of familiar

ideas], not to wrap you back in where you have been all the

time” (106).

“The myth is that field of reference to what is absolutely

transcendent” (58).

“The metaphor is the mask of God through which eternity is

to be experienced” (73).

“What the myths are for is to bring us into a level of consciousness that is

spiritual” (19).

“Myths and dreams come from the same place” (41).

“Whenever one moves out of the transcendent, one comes into a field of opposites. One

has eaten of the tree of knowledge, not only of good

and evil, but of male and female, of right and wrong, of this and that, and of light and

dark” (82).

“The mystery of life is beyond all human conception” (57).

“The myths are metaphorical of spiritual potentiality in the human being, and the same powers that animate our life animate the life of the world”

(28).

“The interplay of man and nature is illustrated in this

relationship with the serpent” (54).

“You can’t say there shouldn’t be poisonous serpents — that’s the way life is” (83).

“Mythology teaches you what’s behind the literature and the

arts, it teaches you about your own life” (14).

“We always think in terms of opposites. But God, the

ultimate, is beyond the pairs of opposites […]” (57).

“Santa Claus is metaphoric of a relationship between parents and children. The relationship

does exist, and so it can be experienced, but there is no

Santa Claus. Santa Claus was simply a way of clueing

children into the appreciation of a relationship” (80).

“[Male] and female are two aspects of one principle. […]

The divine power is antecedent to sexual separation” (58).