The inflated ego of the tyrant is a curse to himself and his world – no matter how his affairs may prosper. Self-terrorized, fear-haunted, alert at e… - Joseph Campbell

I begin to think that I have a genius for working like an ox over totally irrelevant subjects. … I am filled with an excruciating sense of never having gotten anywhere — but when I sit down and try to discover where it is I want to get, I’m at a loss. … The thought of growing into a professor gives me the creeps. A lifetime to be spent trying to kid myself and my pupils into believing that the thing that we are looking for is in books! I don’t know where it is — but I feel just now pretty sure that it isn’t in books.

"Since you came to birth in this world at this time, in this place, and with this particular destiny, it was this indeed that you wanted and required for your own ultimate illumination. That was a great big wonderful thing that you thereupon brought to pass: not the "you" of course, that you now suppose yourself to be, but the "you" that was already there before you were born. You are not now to lose your nerve! Go on through with it and play your own game all the way!"

Wherever the poetry of myth is interpreted as biography, history, or science, it is killed.