Masters of the Human Spirit
“The poets, prophets, and visionaries of untold millenniums – Dante, Aquinas, and Augustine, al-Ghazali and Mohammed, Zarathustra, Shankaracharya, Nagarjuna, and T’ai Tsung, were not bad scientists making misstatements about the weather, or neurotics reading dreams into the stars, but masters of the human spirit teaching a wisdom of death and life. And the thesaurus of the myth-motifs was their vocabulary. They brooded on the state and way of man, and through their broodings came to wisdom; then teaching with the aid of the picture-language of myth, they worked changes on the patterns of their inherited iconographies.”
–Joseph Campbell (American Writer, Editor and Mythologist, 1904-1987)