Joseph Campbell famous quotes

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

#Inspirational #Life #Change

The privilege of a lifetime is being who you are.
-- Joseph Campbell

#Inspirational #Appreciation #Being Yourself

You must have a room, or a certain hour or so a day, where you don’t know what was in the newspapers that morning, you don’t know who your friends are, you don’t know what you owe anybody, you don’t know what anybody owes to you. This is a place where you can simply experience and bring forth what you are and what you might be. This is the place of creative incubation. At first you may find that nothing happens there. But if you have a sacred place and use it, something eventually will happen.
-- Joseph Campbell

#Morning #Creative #Sacred

I don't believe people are looking for the meaning of life as much as they are looking for the experience of being alive.
-- Joseph Campbell

#Inspirational #Life #Happiness

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

#Inspiring #Courage #Veterans Day

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.
-- Joseph Campbell

#Success #Jobs #Character

Apocalypse does not point to a fiery Armageddon but to the fact that our ignorance and our complacency are coming to an end… The exclusivism of there being only one way in which we can be saved, the idea that there is a single religious group that is in sole possession of the truth—that is the world as we know it that must pass away. What is the kingdom? It lies in our realization of the ubiquity of the divine presence in our neighbors, in our enemies, in all of us.
-- Joseph Campbell

#Religious #Lying #Ignorance

All we really want to do is dance.
-- Joseph Campbell

#Want

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.
-- Joseph Campbell

#Inspirational #Work #Doors

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.
-- Joseph Campbell

#Inspirational #Life #Thinking

Perfection isn't human. Human beings are not perfect. What evokes our love--and I mean love, not lust--is the imperfection of the human being. So, when the imperfection of the real person peaks through, say, 'This is a challenge to my compassion.' Then make a try, and something might begin to get going.
-- Joseph Campbell

#Real #Mean #Compassion

The cave you fear to enter holds the treasure you seek.
-- Joseph Campbell

#Inspirational #Life #Strength

When everything is lost, and all seems darkness, then comes the new life and all that is needed.
-- Joseph Campbell

#Life #Darkness #Lost

Eternity is not future or past. Eternity is a dimension of now. It is a dimension of the human spirit -- which is eternal. Find that eternal dimension in yourself, and you will ride through time, and throughout the whole length of your days.
-- Joseph Campbell

#Past #Dimensions #Spirit

One of the great disadvantages of a literary or scriptural tradition like the biblical one is that a deity or context of deities becomes crystallized, petrified at a certain time and place. The deity doesn’t continue to grow, expand, or take into account new cultural forces and new realizations in the sciences, and the result is this make-believe conflict we have in our culture between science and religion.
-- Joseph Campbell

#Believe #Biblical #Culture

What if we choose not to do the things we are supposed to do? The principal gain is a sense of an authentic act - and an authentic life. It may be a short one, but it is an authentic one, and that's a lot better than those short lives full of boredom. The principal loss is security. Another is respect from the community. But you gain the respect of another community, the one that is worth having the respect of.
-- Joseph Campbell

#Short Life #Loss #Boredom

The hero’s journey always begins with the call. One way or another, a guide must come to say, 'Look, you’re in Sleepy Land. Wake. Come on a trip. There is a whole aspect of your consciousness, your being, that’s not been touched. So you’re at home here? Well, there’s not enough of you there.' And so it starts.
-- Joseph Campbell

#Hero #Home #Journey

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

#Inspirational #Life #Spiritual

All the gods, all the heavens, all the hells, are within you.
-- Joseph Campbell

#Inspirational #Heaven #Hell

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

#Inspirational #Life #Path

We must be willing to get rid of the life we've planned, so as to have the life that is waiting for us. The old skin has to be shed before the new one can come. -
-- Joseph Campbell

#Inspirational #Life #Letting Go

I don’t think there is any such thing as an ordinary mortal. Everybody has his own possibility of rapture in the experience of life. All he has to do is recognize it and then cultivate it and get going with it. I always feel uncomfortable when people speak about ordinary mortals because I’ve never met an ordinary man, woman, or child.
-- Joseph Campbell

#Children #Men #Thinking

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)
-- Joseph Campbell

#Inspirational #Religious #Moon

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)
-- Joseph Campbell

#Inspirational #Spiritual #Possibility

There are something like 18 billion cells in the brain alone. There are no two brains alike; there are no two hands alike; there are no two human beings alike. You can take your instructions and your guidance from others, but you must find your own path.
-- Joseph Campbell

#Cells #Hands #Two

Nothing is exciting if you know what the outcome is going to be.
-- Joseph Campbell

#Outcomes #Exciting

Art is the set of wings to carry you out of your own entanglement.
-- Joseph Campbell

#Art #Wings #Entanglement

‎"Make your god transparent to the transcendent, and it doesn't matter what his name is."
-- Joseph Campbell

#Inspirational #Cancer #Names

The eternal principle, which never was born, never will die: it is in all things: it is in you now. You are the wave on the face of the ocean. When the wave is gone, is the water gone? Has anything happened? Nothing has happened. It is a play, a game, a dance.
-- Joseph Campbell

#Ocean #Games #Play

Their task [creative artists], therefore, is to communicate directly from one inward world to another, in such a way that an actual shock of experience will have been rendered: not a mere statement for the information or persuasion of a brain, but an effective communication across the void of space and time from one center of consciousness to another.
-- Joseph Campbell

#Communication #Artist #Space

The goal of life is rapture. Art is the way we experience it.
-- Joseph Campbell

#Art #Goal #Way

I think of mythology as the homeland of the muses, the inspirers of art, the inspirers of poetry. To see life as a poem and yourself participating in a poem is what the myth does for you.
-- Joseph Campbell

#Art #Thinking #Doe

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

#Inspirational #Life #Happiness

What is the cause, though, of the growth of an acorn? The oak that is to come! What is to happen in the future is then the cause of what is occurring now; and, at the same time, what occurred in the past is also the cause of what is happening now. In addition, a great number of things round about, on every side, are causing what is happening now. Everything, all the time, is causing everything else
-- Joseph Campbell

#Past #Numbers #Growth

Eternity is not future or past. Eternity is a dimension of now.
-- Joseph Campbell

#Past #Dimensions #Eternity

Sacred space and sacred time and something joyous to do is all we need. Almost anything then becomes a continuous and increasing joy. What you have to do, you do with play. I think a good way to conceive of sacred space is as a playground. If what you're doing seems like play, you are in it. But you can't play with my toys, you have to have your own. Your life should have yielded some. Older people play with life experiences and realizations or with thoughts they like to entertain. In my case, I have books I like to read that don't lead anywhere.
-- Joseph Campbell

#Fun #Book #Thinking

As Freud has shown, blunders are not the merest chance. They are the result of suppressed desires and conflicts. They are ripples on the surface of life, produced by unsuspected springs. And these may be very deep - as deep as the soul itself. The blunder may amount to the opening of a destiny.
-- Joseph Campbell

#Spring #Destiny #Soul

Change the focus of the eye. When you have done that, then the end of the world as you formerly knew it will have occurred, and you will experience the radiance of the divine presence everywhere, here and now.
-- Joseph Campbell

#Eye #Focus #Done

There's nothing you can do that's more important than being fulfilled. You become a sign, you become a signal, transparent to transcendence; in this way, you will find, live, and become a realization of your own personal myth.
-- Joseph Campbell

#Inspiration #Addiction #Important

The world without spirit is a wasteland. People have the notion of saving the world by shifting things around, changing the rules, and who's on top, and so forth. No, no! Any world is a valid world if it's alive. The thing to do is to bring life to it, and the only way to do that is to find in your own case where the life is and become alive yourself.
-- Joseph Campbell

#People #Saving #Way

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

#Recovery #Addiction #Fruit

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.
-- Joseph Campbell

#Birthday #Money #Jobs

When you are in accord with nature, nature will yield its bounty. This is something that is coming up in our own consciousness now...recognizi ng that by violating the environment in which we are living, we are really cutting off the energy and source of our own living. And it’s this sense of accord, so that living properly in relation to what has to be done in this world one fosters the vitality of the environment.
-- Joseph Campbell

#Cutting #Yield #Energy

If you can see your path laid out in front of you step by step, you know it's not your path. Your own path you make with every step you take. That's why it's your path.
-- Joseph Campbell

#Inspirational #Life #Inspiring

Regrets are illuminations come too late.
-- Joseph Campbell

#Inspirational #Regret #Illumination

No one in the world was ever you before, with your particular gifts and abilities and possibilities.
-- Joseph Campbell

#Yoga #World #Possibility

Where you stumble and fall, there you will find gold.
-- Joseph Campbell

#Inspirational #Fall #Gold

Gods suppressed become devils, and often it is these devils whom we first encounter when we turn inward.
-- Joseph Campbell

#Inspirational #Devil #Encounters

The ultimate aim of the quest must be neither release nor ecstasy for oneself, but the wisdom and the power to serve others.
-- Joseph Campbell

#Quests #Release #Ecstasy

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.
-- Joseph Campbell

#Inspiration #Thinking #Addiction

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.
-- Joseph Campbell

#Inspirational #Block #Crazy

Furthermore, we have not even to risk the adventure alone; for the heroes of all time have gone before us, the labyrinth is fully known; we have only to follow the thread of the hero-path. And where we had thought to find an abomination, we shall find a god; where we had thought to slay another, we shall slay ourselves; where we had thought to travel outward, we shall come to the center of our own existence; where we had thought to be alone, we shall be with all the world.
-- Joseph Campbell

#Inspirational #Hero #Adventure

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.
-- Joseph Campbell

#Inspirational #Self Improvement #Meaning Of Life

All men are capable of reason. That is the fundamental principle of democracy Because everybody's mind is capable of true knowledge, you don't have to have a special authority, or a special revelation telling you that this is the way things should be.
-- Joseph Campbell

#Men #Mind #Democracy

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

#Inspirational #Encouraging #Encouragement

It's characteristic of democracy that majority rule is understood as being effective not only in politics but also in thinking. In thinking, of course, the majority is always wrong.
-- Joseph Campbell

#Thinking #Democracy #Majority

In one of the Upanishads it says, when the glow of a sunset holds you and you say 'Aha,' that is the recognition of the divinity. And when you say 'Aha' to an art object, that is a recognition of divinity. And what divinity is it? It is your divinity, which is the only divinity there is. We are all phenomenal manifestations of a divine will to live, and that will and the consciousness of life is one in all of us, and that is what artwork expresses.
-- Joseph Campbell

#Art #Sunset #Divinity

The key to the Grail is compassion, 'suffering with,' feeling another's sorrow as if it were your own. The one who finds the dynamo of compassion is the one who's found the Grail.
-- Joseph Campbell

#Compassion #Keys #Feelings

There are mythologies that are scattered, broken up, all around us. We stand on what I call the terminal moraine of shattered mythic systems that once structured society. They can be detected all around us. You can select any of these fragments that activate your imagination for your own use. Let it help shape your own relationship to the unconscious system out of which these symbols have come.
-- Joseph Campbell

#Broken #Imagination #Use

Life lives on life. This is the sense of the symbol of the Ouroboros, the serpent biting its tail. Everything that lives lives on the death of something else. Your own body will be food for something else. Anyone who denies this, anyone who holds back, is out of order. Death is an act of giving.
-- Joseph Campbell

#Live Life #Order #Giving

There is an Indian fable of three beings who drank from a river: one was a god, and he drank ambrosia; one was a man, and he drank water; and one was a demon, and he drank filth. What you get is a function of your own consciousness.
-- Joseph Campbell

#Men #Rivers #Water

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

#Inspirational #Life #Motivational

The cave you fear to enter holds the treasure you seek. Fear of the unknown is our greatest fear. Many of us would enter a tiger's lair before we would enter a dark cave. While caution is a useful instinct, we lose many opportunities and much of the adventure of life if we fail to support the curious explorer within us.
-- Joseph Campbell

#Adventure #Dark #Opportunity

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.
-- Joseph Campbell

#Depth #Consciousness #Myth

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.
-- Joseph Campbell

#Inspirational #Life #Encouraging

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

#Inspirational #Motivational #Military

Shakespeare said that art is a mirror held up to nature. And that’s what it is. The nature is your nature, and all of these wonderful poetic images of mythology are referring to something in you. When your mind is trapped by the image out there so that you never make the reference to yourself, you have misread the image.
-- Joseph Campbell

#Art #Mirrors #Mind

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

#Inspirational #Truth #Important

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.
-- Joseph Campbell

#Life #Humanity #Way

A bit of advice Given to a young Native American At the time of his initiation: As you go the way of life, You will see a great chasm. Jump. It is not as wide as you think.
-- Joseph Campbell

#Inspirational #Military #Native American

If you are falling....dive.
-- Joseph Campbell

#Inspirational #Fall

Now all the myths that you have heard and that resonate with you, those are the elements from round about that you are building into a form in your life. The thing worth considering is how they relate to each other in your context, not how they relate to something out there-how they were relevant on the North American prairies or in the Asian jungles hundreds of years agon, but how they are relevant now-unless by contemplating their former meaning you can begin to amplify your own understanding of the role they play in your life.
-- Joseph Campbell

#Years #Play #Understanding

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

#God #Simple #Intellectual

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

#Love #Relationship #Anniversary

The place to find is within yourself.
-- Joseph Campbell

The wonder is that the characteristic efficacy to touch and inspire deep creative centers dwells in the smallest nursery fairy tale-as the flavor of the ocean is contained in a droplet or the whole mystery of life within the egg of a flea. For the symbols of mythology are not manufactured; they cannot be ordered, invented, or permanently suppressed. They are spontaneous productions of the psyche, and each bears within it, undamaged, the germ power of its source.
-- Joseph Campbell

#Ocean #Eggs #Creative

The principle of compassion is that which converts disillusionment into a participatory companionship. This is the basic love, the charity, that turns a critic into a living human being who has something to give to - as well as to demand of - the world.
-- Joseph Campbell

#Compassion #Giving #Principles

In meditating, meditate on your own divinity. The goal of life is to be a vehicle for something higher. Keep your eyes up there between the world of opposites watching your 'play' in the world.Let the world be as it is and learn to rock with the waves.
-- Joseph Campbell

#Eye #Rocks #Opposites

Mythological symbols touch and exhilarate centers of life beyond the reach of vocabularies of reason and coercion.
-- Joseph Campbell

#Vocabulary #Coercion #Reason

Opportunities to find deeper powers within ourselves come when life seems most challenging. Negativism to the pain and ferocity of life is negativism to life. We are not there until we can say 'yea' to it all.
-- Joseph Campbell

#Pain #Opportunity #Challenges

When you are required to exhibit strength, it comes.
-- Joseph Campbell

#Being Strong #Strong

Passion will move men beyond themselves, beyond their shortcomings, beyond their failures.
-- Joseph Campbell

#Work #Moving #Passion

If you're going to have a story, have a big story, or none at all.
-- Joseph Campbell

#Inspirational #Stories #Bigs

There is no way you can use the word “reality” without quotation marks around it.
-- Joseph Campbell

#Reality #Quotation Marks #Use

You know the rule: If you are falling, dive. Do the thing that has to be done.
-- Joseph Campbell

#Fall #Done

No tribal rite has yet been recorded which attempts to keep winter from descending; on the contrary: the rites all prepare the community to endure, together with the rest of nature, the season of the terrible cold.
-- Joseph Campbell

#Inspirational #Life #Winter

For the bliss of the deep abode is not lightly abandoned in favor of the self-scattering of the wakened state,
-- Joseph Campbell

#Self #Favors #Bliss

If you will think of ourselves as coming out of the earth, rather than having been thrown in here from somewhere else, you see that we are the earth, we are the consciousness of the earth. These are the eyes of the Earth. And this is the voice of the earth.
-- Joseph Campbell

#Eye #Thinking #Voice

Mythology tells us that where you stumble, there your treasure is ... The world is a match for us, and we’re a match for the world. And where it seems most challenging lies the greatest invitation to find deeper and greater power in ourselves.
-- Joseph Campbell

#Lying #Challenges #World

We need myths that will identify the individual not with his local group but with the planet.
-- Joseph Campbell

#Groups #Needs #Individual

One great thing about growing old is that nothing is going to lead to anything. Everything is of the moment.
-- Joseph Campbell

#Growing #Moments #Great Things

The psychotic drowns in the same waters in which the mystic swims with delight.
-- Joseph Campbell

#Water #Swim #Delight

At first you might find that nothing happens there. But if you have a sacred space and use it, eventually something will happen. Your sacred space is where you find yourself again and again.
-- Joseph Campbell

#Yoga #Space #Finding Yourself

What will they think of me? Must be put aside for bliss
-- Joseph Campbell

#Communication #Thinking #Bliss

The Deadheads are doing the dance of life and this I would say is the answer to the atom bomb.
-- Joseph Campbell

#Dancing #Atoms #Bombs

Successful marriage is leading innovative lives together, being open, non-programmed. It’s a free fall: how you handle each new thing as it comes along.   As a drop of oil on the sea, you must float, using intellect and compassion to ride the waves.
-- Joseph Campbell

#Fall #Successful #Compassion

There is no security in following the call to adventure.
-- Joseph Campbell

#Adventure #Following #Security

Myth is the secret opening through which the inexhaustible energies of the cosmos pour into human manifestation....
-- Joseph Campbell

#Secret #Energy #Cosmos

If you are to advance, all fixed ideas must go.
-- Joseph Campbell

#Ideas #Fixed

You've got to find the force inside you.
-- Joseph Campbell

#Intuition #Force