Top 552 Quotes & Sayings by Joseph Campbell

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.

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

Love is a friendship set to music.

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.

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?

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.

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

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

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

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

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

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

The privilege of a lifetime is being who you are.

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

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.

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

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.

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

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

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

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

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

Myths are public dreams, dreams are private myths.

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

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.

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

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.

We're in a freefall into future. We don't know where we're going. Things are changing so fast, and always when you're going through a long tunnel, anxiety comes along. And all you have to do to transform your hell into a paradise is to turn your fall into a voluntary act. It's a very interesting shift of perspective and that's all it is... joyful participation in the sorrows and everything changes.

When you are on your path, and it is truly your path, doors will open for you where there were no doors for someone else.

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

You've got to say yes to this miracle of life as it is, not on condition that it follow your rules.

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

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

The very cave you are afraid to enter turns out to be the source of what you are looking for.

You must have a place to which you can go in your heart, your mind, or your house, almost every day, where you do not owe anyone and where no one owes you - a place that simply allows for the blossoming of something new and promising.

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.

Vegetarians are people who cannot hear tomatos screaming.

The way to find out about your happiness is to keep your mind on those moments when you feel most happy, when you really are happy-not excited, not just thrilled, but deeply happy. This requires a little bit of self analysis. What is it that makes you happy? Stay with it, no matter what people tell you. This is what I call "following your bliss."

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

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 what we're seeking is an experience of being alive, so that our life experiences on the purely physical plane will have resonance within our own innermost being and reality, so that we actually feel the rapture of being alive.

All the gods, all the heavens, all the hells, are within you.

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.

Furthermore, we have not even to risk the adventure alone; for the heroes of all time have gone before us; the labyrinth is thoroughly 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; and where we had thought to be alone, we shall be with all the world.

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.

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.

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.

I have found that you have only to take that one step toward the gods, and they will then take ten steps toward you. That step, the heroic first step of the journey, is out of, or over the edge of, your boundaries, and it often must be taken before you know that you will.

People forget facts, but they remember stories.

Eternity is not future or past. Eternity is a dimension of now.

Life is not a problem to be solved but a mystery to be lived. Follow the path that is no path, follow your bliss.

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

You are more than you think you are. There are dimensions of your being and a potential for realization and consciousness that are not included in your concept of yourself. Your life is much deeper and broader than you conceive it to be here. What you are living is but a fractional inkling of what is really within you, what gives you life, breadth, and depth.

When we talk about settling the world's problems, we're barking up the wrong tree. The world is perfect. It's a mess. It has always been a mess. We're not going to change it. Our job is to straighten out our own lives.

Midlife is when you reach the top of the ladder and find that it was against the wrong wall.

The old skin has to be shed before the new one can come.

We're not on our journey to save the world but to save ourselves. But in doing that you save the world. The influence of a vital person vitalizes.

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.

If you are on the right path you will find that invisible hands are helping.

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