Authors — Quotes

Joseph Campbell Quotes: 41

I don't believe people are looking for the meaning of life as much as they are looking for the experience of being alive.
When people get married because they think it's a long-time love affair, they'll be divorced very soon, because all love affairs end in disappointment. But marriage is a recognition of a spiritual identity.
Love is a friendship set to music.
Life has no meaning. Each of us has meaning and we bring it to life. It is a waste to be asking the question when you are the answer.
We must be willing to let go of the life we planned so as to have the life that is waiting for us.
We must let go of the life we have planned, so as to accept the one that is waiting for us.
A hero is someone who has given his or her life to something bigger than oneself.
The privilege of a lifetime is being who you are.
If you do follow your bliss you put yourself on a kind of track that has been there all the while, waiting for you, and the life that you ought to be living is the one you are living. Follow your bliss and don't be afraid, and doors will open where you didn't know they were going to be.
Follow your bliss and the universe will open doors where there were only walls.
Follow your bliss and the universe will open doors for you where there were only walls.
People say that what we’re all seeking is a meaning for life. I don’t think that’s what we’re really seeking. I think that what we’re seeking is an experience of being alive, so that our life experiences on the purely physical plane will have resonances with our own innermost being and reality, so that we actually feel the rapture of being alive.
The Power of Myth
If the path before you is clear, you're probably on someone else's.
Sit in a room and read--and read and read. And read the right books by the right people. Your mind is brought onto that level, and you have a nice, mild, slow-burning rapture all the time.
The Power of Myth
Your sacred space is where you can find yourself over and over again.
The goal of life is to make your heartbeat match the beat of the universe, to match your nature with Nature.
A Joseph Campbell Companion: Reflections on the Art of Living
All religions are true but none are literal.
Half the people in the world think that the metaphors of their religious traditions, for example, are facts. And the other half contends that they are not facts at all. As a result we have people who consider themselves believers because they accept metaphors as facts, and we have others who classify themselves as atheists because they think religious metaphors are lies.
Thou Art That: Transforming Religious Metaphor
Myth is much more important and true than history. History is just journalism and you know how reliable that is.
You enter the forestat the darkest point,where there is no path.Where there is a way or path,it is someone else's path.You are not on your own path.If you follow someone else's way,you are not going to realizeyour potential.
The Hero's Journey: Joseph Campbell on His Life & Work
We're so engaged in doing things to achieve purposes of outer value that we forget the inner value, the rapture that is associated with being alive, is what it is all about.
The Power of Myth
The job of an educator is to teach students to see vitality in themselves
Every religion is true one way or another. It is true when understood metaphorically. But when it gets stuck in its own metaphors, interpreting them as facts, then you are in trouble.
Myth is what we call other people's religion.
The fates lead him who will; him who won't they drag.
The demon that you can swallow gives you its power, and the greater life’s pain, the greater life’s reply.
The Power of Myth
Mythology is not a lie, mythology is poetry, it is metaphorical. It has been well said that mythology is the penultimate truth--penultimate because the ultimate cannot be put into words. It is beyond words. Beyond images, beyond that bounding rim of the Buddhist Wheel of Becoming. Mythology pitches the mind beyond that rim, to what can be known but not told.
The Power of Myth
Just as anyone who listens to the muse will hear, you can write out of your own intention or out of inspiration. There is such a thing. It comes up and talks. And those who have heard deeply the rhythms and hymns of the gods, can recite those hymns in such a way that the gods will be attracted.
The Hero's Journey: Joseph Campbell on His Life & Work
When you realize that eternity is right here now, that it is within your possibility to experience the eternity of your own truth and being, then you grasp the following: That which you are was never born and will never die. . . . (90)
Thou Art That: Transforming Religious Metaphor
You become mature when you become the authority of your own life.
A Joseph Campbell Companion: Reflections on the Art of Living
There seem to be only two kinds of people: Those who think that metaphors are facts, and those who know that they are not facts. Those who know they are not facts are what we call "atheists,"and those who think they are facts are "religious."Which group really gets the message?
Thou Art That: Transforming Religious Metaphor
Now I found it in writing sentences. You can write that sentence in a way that you would have written it last year. Or you can write it in the way of the exquisite nuance that is sriting in your mind now. But that takes a lot of ... waiting for the right word to come.
The Hero's Journey: Joseph Campbell on His Life & Work
How does the ordinary person come to the transcendent? For a start, I would say, study poetry. Learn how to read a poem. You need not have the experience to get the message, or at least some indication of the message. It may come gradually. (92)
Thou Art That: Transforming Religious Metaphor
It may be a species of impudence to think that the way you understand God is the way God is. (60).
Thou Art That: Transforming Religious Metaphor
Follow your bliss and doors will open where there were no doors before.
The Power of Myth
The problem in our society and in our schools is to inclulcate, without overdoing it, the notion of education, as in the Latin educere--to lead, to bring out what is in someone rather than merely to indoctrinate him/her from the outside. (89)
Thou Art That: Transforming Religious Metaphor
With the moon walk, the religious myth that sustained these notions could no longer be held. With our view of earthrise, we could see that the earth and the heavens were no longer divided but that the earth is in the heavens. (105)
Thou Art That: Transforming Religious Metaphor
What we're learning in our schools is not the wisdom of life. We're learning technologies, we're getting information. There's a curious reluctance on the part of faculties to indicate the life values of their subjects.
Is the god the source, or is the god a human manner of conceiving of the force and energy that supports the world? In our tradition God is a male. This male and female differentiation is made, however, within the field of time and space, the field of duality. If God is beyond duality, you cannot say that God is a "He."You cannot say God is a "She."You cannot say God is an "It."(18)
Thou Art That: Transforming Religious Metaphor
Your life is the fruit of your own doing. You have no one to blame but yourself.
The Garden is a metaphor for the following: our minds, and our thinking in terms of pairs of opposites--man and woman, good and evil--are as holy as that of a god. (50)
Thou Art That: Transforming Religious Metaphor