heroism / words to chew on

"The source of all existence ... yields the world's plenitude of both good and evil.  Ugliness and beauty, sin and virtue, please and pain, are equally its production. ... Hence the figures worshiped in the temples of the world always beautiful, always benign, or even necessarily virtuous. ... Likewise, mythology does not hold as its greatest here the merely virtuous man.  Virtue is but the pedagogical prelude to the culminating insight, which goes beyond all pairs of opposites."  -- Joseph Campbell, in The Hero with a Thousand Faces