“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 “

“What a great poem teaches you, and it’s not intellectual at all, is the resonance in the language that’s heard there. This goes back to the very origins of poetry and to the very origins of language. I think poetry is as old as language, and both come out of the same thing — an effort to try to express something that is inexpressible. If something can’t be said, what do you do? You scream.”

— W. S. Merwin, in “Q&A: W. S. Merwin”

“To spread joy, you have to have it. To impart delight, you have to be more or less delightful. And to be delightful is not some factor of trying to make yourself look delightful, it is to do things that are delightful to you. You become thereby delightful to others.

That is to say people who are interesting are people who are interested.

Any person for example who is constantly thinking about all sorts of other things and other people and so on, because they are fascinating, becomes a fascinating person.

But a person who doesn’t think about anybody else, and who’s got very little going on inside their skull, is boring… if you try to enrich your personality by taking a course in ‘how to win friends and influence people,’ or ‘how to be a real person,’ you become just a washout. Because you’ll be in a sort of small circle, as it were. You’ll be like someone who tried to get good nutrition by biting his nails, and then the fingers next, and then half an arm gone and so on. You’re entirely nourishing yourself with yourself.

— Alan Watts

“Your judgments about other people say more about you than they do about the people you’re judging. The reason you can detect the weaknesses and insecurities of others is because you have experienced those same weaknesses and insecurities.

Similarly, the reason you’re able to see beauty in others is because that beauty lives in you as well. The positive possibilities you see for others are, in many ways, your possibilities too.

It’s very helpful to think of the world outside of you as a mirror. Whatever you see beyond you in some way reflects what is inside of you.The most powerful and effective way to improve the world around you, is to improve yourself. The best way to bring real value into your life, is to create real value for others.

What you admire and appreciate and support in others, grows stronger within you as well. When you seek to understand, you will be understood, and when you listen thoughtfully, you will be heard.

Your world is a mirror, so choose each day to show it your best, most loving and supportive face. And you’ll be delighted with the face you see looking back at you.

— Ralph Marston

An intimate relationship does not banish loneliness. Only when we are comfortable with who we are can we truly function independently in a healthy way, can we truly function within a relationship. Two halves do not make a whole when it comes to a healthy relationship: it takes two wholes.”

— Patricia Fry

“For I do not exist: there exist but the thousands of mirrors that reflect me. With every acquaintance I make, the population of phantoms resembling me increases. Somewhere they live, somewhere they multiply. I alone do not exist.”

— Vladimir Nabokov, “The Eye”

“As I passed the entrance I thought, What the — ? I thought I’d seen something in the dark. I broke out in a sweat. I shined my flashlight at the wall next to the shelf. And there I was. A mirror, in other words. It was just my reflection in a mirror. There wasn’t a mirror there the night before, so they must have put one in between then and now. Man, was I startled. Relieved that it was just me in a mirror, I felt a bit stupid for having been so surprised. So that’s all it is, I told myself. How dumb. I took a cigarette from my pocket and lit it. After a couple of puffs, I suddenly noticed something odd. My reflection in the mirror wasn’t me. It looked exactly like me on the outside, but it definitely wasn’t me. No, that’s not it. It was me, of course, but another me. Another me that should never have been. I don’t know how to put it. It’s hard to explain what it felt like. The one thing I did understand was that this other figure loathed me. Inside it was a hatred like an iceberg floating in a dark sea. The kind of hatred that no one could ever diminish. We stood there, staring at each other. Finally his hand moved, the fingertips of his right hand touching his chin, and then slowly, like a bug, crept up his face. I suddenly realized I was doing the same thing. Like I was the reflection of what was in the mirror and he was trying to take control of me.”

— Haruki Murakami, “The Mirror” in “Blind Willow, Sleeping Woman”

“For what gives value to travel is fear. It breaks down a kind of inner structure we have. One can no longer cheat — hide behind the hours spent at the office or at the plant (those hours we protest so loudly, which protect us so well from the pain of being alone). I have always wanted to write novels in which my heroes would say: ‘What would I do without the office?’ or again: ‘My wife has died, but fortunately I have all these orders to fill for tomorrow.’ Travel robs us of such refuge. Far from our own people, our own language, stripped of all our props (one doesn’t know the fare on the streetcars, or anything else), we are completely on the surface of ourselves. But also, soul-sick, we restore to every being and every object its miraculous value. A woman dancing without a thought in her head, a bottle on a table, glimpsed behind a curtain: each image becomes a symbol. The whole of life seems reflected in it, insofar as it summarizes our own life at the moment. When we are aware of every gift, the contradictory intoxications we can enjoy (including that of lucidity) are indescribable.”

— Albert Camus, “Lyrical and Critical Essays”

“We walk the corridors, searching the shelves and rearranging them, looking for lines of meaning amid leagues of cacophony and incoherence, reading the history of the past and of the future, collecting our thoughts and collecting the thoughts of others, and every so often glimpsing mirrors, in which we may recognize creatures of the information.”

— Jorge Luis Borges, “The Library of Babel” in “Labyrinths”