“Now, all these myths that you have heard and that resonate with you, those are the elements from round about that you are building into a form in your life. The thing worth considering is how they relate to each other in your context, not how they relate to something out there - how they were relevant on the North American prairies or in the Asian jungles hundreds of years ago, but how they are relevant now - unless by contemplating their former meaning you can begin to amplify your own understanding of the role they play in your life.”

— Joseph Campbell, “Pathways to Bliss: Mythology and Personal Transformation “

“There is something uncompromisingly honest in the experience of silence. It is from silence that all speech, and therefore all myth, begins. Speech is the myth of that which cannot be spoken. Without speech, there can be no theory, without theory there can be no answers. When the world of myth and theory confuses us, silence is always there, affording us the opportunity not merely to question our assumptions, but to discard them and begin again.”

— John Francis (Planetwalker)

“We will gather images and images of images up till the last, which is blank. This one we will agree on.”

— Reb Carasso

“When we accept this final point — surely the most heterodox, from the point of view of most philosophers — we are for the first time in a position to study and to teach Indian, Chinese, European, and Arabic philosophy alongside one another in a serious and adequate way. When we accept, for example, that all of the great Axial Age civilizations, to use Karl Jaspers’s helpful label, are the product of a single suite of broad historical changes that swept the Eurasian continent, and thus that Chinese, Indian, and Greek thought-worlds are not aboriginal in any meaningful sense (neither are Cree or Huron or Inuit, for that matter, but this can be dealt with another time), then all of a sudden it becomes possible to study, say, the Buddha and his followers not as an expression of some absolutely other Eastern ‘wisdom’, but instead as a local expression of global developments, or as a node in a web. (…)

There are, so to speak, tunnels in the basement between India and Greece, but we’re afraid to go down there. And so the result is that we are not so much liberating philosophy from culture, as we are making each culture’s philosophy irreducibly and incomparably its own, just as if it were a matter of displaying folk costumes in some Soviet ethnographic museum, or in the opening ceremonies of the Olympics. This is unscientific, unrigorous, and unacceptable in any other academic discipline.”

— Justin E. H. Smith, “What Is ‘Non-Western’ Philosophy?”

“When men stop believing in God, it isn’t that they then believe in nothing: they believe in everything.”

— Umberto Eco

“In the ancient cultural places of the world there was a temple, a church or a cathedral in its center. From there came the order of life. In every modern big city there is a bank building in its center. In my ‘Pied Piper’ I have tried to depict this as a kind of demon cult, where money is something to be prayed to like something sacred. It’s even being expressed there in words that it is ‘God’.”

— Michael Ende, “Michael Ende’s Last Words to the Japanese”

“The transformations of culture do not take place in history, they take place in myth. A model, a hypothesis, or a myth is a way of rendering the invisible. Because the unconscious is outside time, it can perceive transformations beyond the limits of the ego. These unconscious perceptions are expressed in art or mythologies. We ourselves are living in an age of cultural transformation, but if you went to the experts to ask for a description, they would tell you nothing. You have to go to those who are at home in the unconscious and in the subconscious, the artists and prophets: through myth and symbol in art, science fiction or religion, they will describe the present by speaking about the future.”

— William I. Thompson

“It’s impossible to understand roughly three-quarters of Western art if you don’t know the events of the Old and the New Testaments and the stories of the saints.”

— Umberto Eco, “The Lost Wisdom of the Three Wise Men”

“When we lose our myths, we lose our place in the universe.”

— Madeleine L’Engle

“What, then, is the meaning of it all? What can we say to dispel the mystery of existence? If we take everything into account, not only what the ancients knew, but all of what we know today that they didn’t know, then I think that we must frankly admit that we do not know.”

— Richard Feynman