Joseph Campbell Quotations

Find a place inside where there's joy, and the joy will burn out the pain.

We must let go of the life we have planned, so as to accept the one that is waiting for us.

The privilege of a lifetime is being who you are.

A hero is someone who has given his or her life to something bigger than oneself.

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

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

Computers are like Old Testament gods; lots of rules and no mercy.

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.

Nietzsche was the one who did the job for me. At a certain moment in his life, the idea came to him of what he called "the love of your fate." Whatever your fate is, whatever the hell happens, you say, "This is what I need." It may look like a wreck, but go at it as though it were an opportunity, a challenge. If you bring love to that moment-not discouragement-you will find the strength is there. Any disaster you can survive is an improvement in your character, your stature, and your life. What a privilege! This is when the spontaneity of your own nature will have a chance to flow.

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 you make the sacrifice in marriage, you're sacrificing not to each other but to unity in a relationship.

Opportunities to find deeper powers within ourselves come when life seems most challenging.

Participate joyfully in the sorrows of the world. We cannot cure the world of sorrows, but we can choose to live in joy.

When we quit thinking primarily about ourselves and our own self-preservation, we undergo a truly heroic transformation of consciousness.

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.

Is the system going to flatten you out and deny you your humanity, or are you going to be able to make use of the system to the attainment of human purposes?

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

Myths are public dreams, dreams are private myths.

Your life is the fruit of your own doing. You have no one to blame but yourself.

I think the person who takes a job in order to live - that is to say, for the money - has turned himself into a slave.

I don't have to have faith, I have experience.

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.

God is a metaphor for that which transcends all levels of intellectual thought. It's as simple as that.

The big question is whether you are going to be able to say a hearty yes to your adventure.

What each must seek in his life never was on land or sea. It is something out of his own unique potentiality for experience, something that never has been and never could have been experienced by anyone else.

It is by going down into the abyss that we recover the treasures of life. Where you stumble, there lies your treasure.

Life is without meaning. You bring the meaning to it. The meaning of life is whatever you ascribe it to be. Being alive is the meaning.

One way or another, we all have to find what best fosters the flowering of our humanity in this contemporary life, and dedicate ourselves to that.

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.

Words are always qualifications and limitations. That's why it is a peak experience to break past all that, every now and then, and to realize, ""Oh...... ah.....

Whenever the poetry of myth is interpreted as biography, history, or science, it is killed. The living images become only remote facts of a distant time or place. Furthermore, it is never difficult to demonstrate that as science and history, mythology is absurd.

Love thine enemies because they are the instruments to your destiny.

God is a metaphor for that which trancends all levels of intellectual thought. It's as simple as that.

Heroism is a matter of integrity--becoming more and more at each step ourselves.

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 within our own innermost being and reality, so that we actually feel the rapture of being alive.

Original Experience has not been interpreted for you, and so youve got to work out life for yourself. Either you can take it or you cant. You dont have to go far off the interpreted path to find yourself in very difficult situations. The courage to face the trials and to bring a whole new body of possibilities into the field of interpreted experience for other people to experience that is the heros deed.

When you see the Earth from space, you don't see any divisions of nation-states there. This may be the symbol of the new mythology to come; this is the country we will celebrate, and these are the people we are one with.

The demon that you can swallow gives you its power, and the greater lifes pain, the greater lifes reply.

A ritual is the enactment of a myth. And, by participating in the ritual, you are participating in the myth. And since myth is a projection of the depth wisdom of the psyche, by participating in a ritual, participating in the myth, you are being, as it were, put in accord with that wisdom, which is the wisdom that is inherent within you anyhow. Your consciousness is being re-minded of the wisdom of your own life.

You know, when real trouble comes your humanity is awakened. The fundamental human experience is that of compassion.

When Boeing goes down, it goes down for several years,

When you follow your bliss... doors will open where you would not have thought there would be doors; and where there wouldn't be a door for anyone else.

When you make a sacrifice in marriage, you're sacrificing not to each other but to unity in a relationship.

We do not think the Boeing IAM workers will strike when their contract expires on Sept. 2.

At such moments, you realize that you and the other are, in fact, one. It's a big realization. Survival is the second law of life. The first is that we are all one.

Our demons are out own limitations, which shut us off from the realization of the ubiquity of the spirit...each of these demons is conquered in a vision quest.

People say that what we're all seeking is a meaning for life. I think that what we're really seeking is an experience of being alive, so that our life experiences on the purely physical plane will have resonance within our innermost being and reality, so that we can actually feel the rapture of being alive.

Any life career that you choose in following your bliss should be chosen with that sense that nobody can frighten me off from this thing. And no matter what happens, this is the validation of my life and action.

A computer is like an Old Testament god, with a lot of rules and no mercy

It's a little too early to tell what happened, ... This had the appearance of a well-planned and well-negotiated deal that was designed to be released on Monday.

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

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

Everybody's going to be looking at these little bits and pieces and deciding what they like and don't like. There's enough attractive pieces in that business that quite a few people will express an interest.

I've heard youngsters use some of George Lucas' terms -- "the Force" and "the dark side." So it must be hitting somewhere. It's a good sound teaching, I would say.

It was a combination of a high rate of speed and an inexperienced driver. It's an unbelievable tragedy.

It Takes Courage To Do What You Want

The world is full of people that have stopped listening to themselves or have listened only their neighbors to learn what they ought to do, how they ought to behave, and what the values are they should be living for.

The warrior's approach is to say ""yes"" to life: ""yea"" to it all.

Smiths' share price targets range from down 4 percent to 20 gain, highlighting a debate about what Smiths should be worth.

I had my heart set on three things: One, the choral office; two, the habit; and community life. We spend a lot of time together. We work together, eat together, pray together,

If you can see your path laid outin front of you step by step, you knowit's not your path. Your own path youmake with every step you take. That'swhy it's your path.

If you follow your bliss, you put yourself on a kind of track, which has been there all the while waiting for you, and the life that you ought to be living is the one you are living

If you follow your bliss, doors will open for you that wouldn't have opened for anyone else.

If you assume these 17,000 guys go away and never come back, it'd make a difference. But if they come back in two weeks rather than one week, I don't see it making a difference. They don't even have a strike fund. I'm a long way from getting worried.

If you realize what the real problem is - losing yourself - you realize that this itself is the ultimate trial.

However, if we are wrong and there is a strike, we would expect BA shares to trade down by $2 to $4 per share and we would consider that a buying opportunity.

Airbus really escaped unscathed in this cycle, ... Boeing has a monopoly with the big planes in Asia. (It) has really made a living out there; the Asian flu affects Boeing more than Airbus.

The goal is to live with godlike composure on the full rush of energy, like Dionysus riding the leopard, without being torn to pieces.

Well, one of the problems about being psychoanalyzed is, as Nietzsche said, Be careful lest in casting out your devils that you cast out the best thing that’s in you. So many people who are really in deep analysis look as though and act as though they have been filleted. There’s no bone there, there’s no stuff! How to get rid of ego as dictator and turn it into messenger and servant and scout, to be in your service, is the trick.

The function of (heroic) symbols is to give you a sense of Aha! Yes, I know what it is, it's myself.

Certainly Star Wars has a valid mythological perspective. It shows the state as a machine and asks, "Is the machine going to crush humanity or serve humanity?" Humanity comes not from the machine but from the heart. What I see in Star Wars is the same problem that Faust gives us:

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)

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

I always tell my students follow your bliss. When you have that feeling then stay with it and don't let anyone throw you off.

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)

When you follow your bliss a kind of track opens up, that's always been there, waiting for you. And the life that you should be living, is the one that you will be living.

The usual marriage in traditional cultures was arranged for by the families. It wasn't a person-to-person decision at all. . . . In the Middle Ages, that was the kind of marriage that was sanctified by the Church. And so the troubadour idea of real person-to-person Amor was very dangerous. . . . It is in direct contradiction to the way of the Church. The word AMOR spelt backwards is ROMA, the Roman Catholic Church, which was justifying marriages that were simply political and social in their character. And so came this movement validating individual choice, what I call following your bliss.

Modern romance, like Greek tragedy, celebrates the mystery of dismemberment, which is life in time. The happy ending is justly scorned as a misrepresentation; for the world, as we know it, as we have seen it, yields but one ending: death, disintegration, dismemberment, and the crucifixion of our heart with the passing of the forms that we have loved.

Mephistopheles, the machine man, can provide us with all the means, and is thus likely to determine the aims of life as well. But of course the characteristic of Faust, which makes him eligible to be saved, is that he seeks aims that are not those of the machine.

He must put aside his pride, his virtue, beauty and life and bow or submit to the absolutely intolerable.

Myths are public dreams, dreams are private myths. We must be willing to get rid of the life we planned, so as to have the life that is waiting for us. I have bought this wonderful machine — a computer ... it seems to me to be an Old Testament god, with a lot of rules and no mercy.

The myth is the public domain and the dream is the private myth. If your private myth, your dream, happens to coincide with that of the society, you are in good accord with your group. If it isn't, you've got a long adventure in the dark forest ahead of you.

There are now no more horizons. And with the dissolution of horizons we have experienced and are experiencing collisions, terrific collisions, not only of peoples but also of their mythologies. It is as when dividing panels are withdrawn from between chambers of very hot and very cold airs: there is a rush of these forces together.

And if there was no Fall, what then of the need for Redemption? What god was offended and by whom? Some especially touchy cave bear whose skull had been improperly enshrined?

What is a god? A god is a personification of a motivating power of a value system that functions in human life and in the universe.

The latest incarnation of Oedipus, the continued romance of Beauty and the Beast, stand this afternoon on the corner of 42nd Street and Fifth Avenue, waiting for the traffic light to change.

What gods are there, what gods have there ever been, that were not from man's imagination?

Man should not be in the service of society, society should be in the service of man. When man is in the service of society, you have a monster state, and that's what is threatening the world at this minute. ...

Now, when Luke Skywalker unmasks his father, he is taking off the machine role that the father has played. The father was the uniform. That is power, the state role.

..enlarge the pupil of the eye, so that the body with its attendant personality will no longer obstruct the view. Immortality is then experienced as a present fact...

If you follow someone else's way, you are not going to realize your potential.

Life will always be sorrowful. We can't change it, but we can change our attitude toward it.

What I think is that a good life is one hero journey after another. Over and over again, you are called to the realm of adventure, you are called to new horizons. Each time, there is the same problem: do I dare? And then if you do dare, the dangers are there, and the help also, and the fulfillment or the fiasco. There's always the possibility of fiasco. But there's also the possibility of bliss.

God is within you! You yourself are the creator. If you find that place within you from which you brought this thing about, you will be able to live with it and affirm it, perhaps even enjoy it, as your life.

Society has provided [children] no rituals by which they become members of the tribe, of the community. All children need to be twice born, to learn to function rationally in the present world, leaving childhood behind.

Love is the burning point of life, and since all life is sorrowful, so is love. The stronger the love, the more the pain. Love itself is pain, you might say -the pain of being truly alive.

Perhaps some of us have to go through dark and devious ways before we can find the river of peace or the highroad to the soul's destination.

The warrior’s approach is to say ‘yes’ to life: ‘yes’ to it all.

He who thinks he knows, doesn't know. He who knows that he doesn't know, knows.

Christianity isn’t moving people’s lives today. What’s moving people’s lives is the stock market and the baseball scores. What are people excited about? It’s a totally materialistic level that has taken over the world. There isn’t even an ideal that anybody’s fighting for.