Joseph Campbell Quotes

You become mature when you become the authority of your own life.

Follow your bliss and the universe will open doors for you where there were only walls.

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.

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.

Writer’s block results from too much head. Cut off your head. Pegasus, poetry, was born of Medusa when her head was cut off. You have to be reckless when writing. Be as crazy as your conscience allows.

You don't ask what a dance means. You enjoy it. You don't ask what the world means. You enjoy it. You don't ask what you mean. You enjoy it.

Maslow's five values are the values for which people live when they have nothing to live for. Nothing has seized them, nothing has caught them, nothing has driven them spiritually mad and made them worth talking to.

Thinking in mythological terms helps to put you in accord with the inevitables of this vale of tears. You learn to recognize the positive values in what appear to be the negative moments and aspects of your life. The big question is whether you are going to be able to say a hearty yes to your adventure.

If the path before you is clear, you're probably on someone else's.

The goal of life is to make your heartbeat match the beat of the universe, to match your nature with Nature.

You enter the forest
at 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 realize
your potential.

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 experience of eternity right here and now is the function of life. Heaven is not the place to have the experience; here is the place to have the experience.

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.

Your sacred space is where you can find yourself over and over again.

Myth is much more important and true than history. History is just journalism and you know how reliable that is.

Where you stumble and fall, there you will find gold.

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.

We must be willing to let go of the life we planned so as to have the life that is waiting for us.

The fates lead him who will; him who won't they drag.

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)

It may be a species of impudence to think that the way you understand God is the way God is. (60).

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)

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)

The job of an educator is to teach students to see vitality in themselves

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.

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)

All religions are true but none are literal.

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.

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?

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)

Mythology may, in a real sense, be defined as other people's religion. And religion may, in a sense, be understood as popular misunderstanding of mythology. (8)

Every moment is utterly unique and will not be continued in eternity. This fact gives life its poignancy and should concentrate your attention on what you are experiencing now.

The cave you fear to enter holds the treasure you seek.

When you translate the Bible with excessive literalism, you demythologize it. The possibility of a convincing reference to the individual's own spiritual experience is lost. (111)

The images of Myth are reflections of Spiritual and Depth potentialities of every one of us. Through contemplating those we evoke those powers in our own lives to operate through ourselves.

Mythology is composed by poets out of their insights and realizations. Mythologies are not invented; they are found. You can no more tell us what your dream is going to be tonight than we can invent a myth. Myths come from the mystical region of essential experience.

Marriage . . . is not a love affair; it is an ordeal. (92)

[Marriage] is the reunion of the separated duad. Originally you were one. You are now two in the world, but the recognition of the spiritual identity is what marriage is.

The only way you can talk about this great tide in which you’re a participant is as Schopenhauer did: the universe is a dream dreamed by a single dreamer where all the dream characters dream too.

Revolution doesn't have to do with smashing something; it has to do with bringing something forth. If you spend all your time thinking about that which you are attacking, then you are negatively bound to it. You have to find the zeal in yourself and bring that out.

Follow your bliss and doors will open where there were no doors before.

It is only when a man tames his own demons that he becomes the king of himself if not of the world.

A myth is something that has never happened, but is happening all the time.

In our society of fixed texts and printed words, it is the function of the poet to see the life value of the facts round about, and to deify them, as it were, to provide images that relate the everyday to the eternal.

If you want to understand what's most important to a society, don't examine its art or literature, simply look at its biggest buildings.

Lo que el creativo saca a la luz es algo que estaba esperando ser extraído en todos.

Joseph Campbell Quotes

Biography

Joseph Campbell Quotes

Share Page

Joseph Campbell Wiki

Joseph Campbell At Amazon

Best Quotes Ever Topics

Best Quotes Ever Authors