Inspirational Quotations

Inspirational Quotes by Joseph Campbell (American Mythologist, Writer)

Joseph John Campbell (1904–87) was an American Professor of Literature at Sarah Lawrence College who worked in comparative mythology and comparative religion. His work covers many aspects of the human experience. Campbell’s most well-known work is his book The Hero with a Thousand Faces, in which he discusses his theory of the journey of the archetypal hero shared by world mythologies, termed the monomyth.

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This, I believe, is the great Western truth: that each of us is a completely unique creature and that, if we are ever to give any gift to the world, it will have to come out of our own experience and fulfillment of our own potentialities, not someone else’s.
Joseph Campbell

If you 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. When you can see that, you begin to meet people who are in your field of bliss, and they open doors to you. I say, follow your bliss and don’t be afraid, and doors will open where you didn’t know they were going to be.
Joseph Campbell
Topics: Courage, Kind, Life, Follow, People

Now, I came to this idea of bliss because in Sanskrit, which is the great spiritual language of the world, there are three terms that represent the brink, the jumping-off place to the ocean of transcendence: Sat, Chit, Ananda. The word “Sat” means being. “Chit” means consciousness. “Ananda” means bliss or rapture. I thought, “I don’t know whether my consciousness is proper consciousness or not; I don’t know whether what I know of my being is my proper being or not; but I do know where my rapture is. So let me hang on to rapture, and that will bring me both my consciousness and my being”. I think it worked.
Joseph Campbell

I’ll tell you a way, a very nice way. 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. This realization of life can be a constant realization in your living. When you find an author who really grabs you, read everything he has done. Don’t say, “Oh, I want to know what So-and-so did”—and don’t bother at all with the best-seller list. Just read what this one author has to give you. And then you can go read what he had read. And the world opens up in a way that is consistent with a certain point of view. But when you go from one author to another, you may be able to tell us the date when each wrote such and such a poem—but he hasn’t said anything to you.
Joseph Campbell

The role of the artist I now understood as that of revealing through the world-surfaces the implicit forms of the soul, and the great agent to assist the artist was the myth.
Joseph Campbell
Topics: The Artist

Perhaps some of us have to go through dark and devious ways before we can find the river of peace or highroad to the soul’s destination.
Joseph Campbell
Topics: Peace

Chief Seattle, of the Indians that inhabited the Seattle area, wrote a wonderful paper that has to do with putting oneself in tune with the universe. He said, “Why should I lament the disappearance of my people! All things end, and the white man will find this out also.” And this goes for the universe. One can be at peace with that. This doesn’t mean that one shouldn’t participate in efforts to correct the situation. But underlying the effort to change must be an ‘at peace.’ To win a dog sled race is great. To lose is okay too.
Joseph Campbell
Topics: The Universe

When everything is lost, and all seems darkness, then comes the new life and all that is needed.
Joseph Campbell
Topics: New, Life

You know the rule: If you are falling, dive.
Joseph Campbell

Ramakrishna once said that if all you think of are your sins, then you are a sinner. And when I read that, I thought of my boyhood, going to confession on Saturdays, meditating on all the little sins that I had committed during the week. Now I think one should go and say, “Bless me, Father, for I have been great, these are the good things I have done this week”. Identify your notion of yourself with the positive, rather than with the negative.
Joseph Campbell

You enter the forest at the darkest point, where there is no path. Where there is a way or a 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.
Joseph Campbell

A dream is your creative vision for your life in the future. A goal is what specifically you intend to make happen. Dreams and goals should be just out of your present reach but not out of sight. Dreams and goals are coming attractions in your life.
Joseph Campbell
Topics: Dreams, Goals

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.
Joseph Campbell
Topics: Ego

I don’t believe in being interested in a subject just because it’s said to be important. I believe in being caught by it somehow.
Joseph Campbell

There is an important idea in Nietzsche, of Amor fati, the “love of your fate,” which is in fact your life. As he says, if you say no to a single factor in your life, you have unraveled the whole thing. Furthermore, the more challenging or threatening the situation or context to be assimilated and affirmed, the greater the stature of the person who can achieve it. The demon that you can swallow gives you its power, and the greater life’s pain, the greater life’s reply.
Joseph Campbell

Follow your bliss. Find where it is and don’t be afraid to follow it.
Joseph Campbell
Topics: Dreams, Aptness, Appropriateness, Goals, Time Management, Aspirations, Value of Time

People say that what we’re all seeking in life 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 experience on the purely physical plane will have resonances within our innermost being and reality, so that we actually fee the rapture of being alive.
Joseph Campbell
Topics: Living, Life and Living, Live, Think, People, Life, Experience

I don’t have to have faith, I have experience.
Joseph Campbell
Topics: Experience

Myths are public dreams, dreams are private myths.
Joseph Campbell
Topics: Dreams

The ultimate dragon is within you.
Joseph Campbell

We’re so engaged in doing things to achieve purposes of outer value that we forget that the inner value, the rapture that is associated with being alive, is what it’s all about.
Joseph Campbell
Topics: Value

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.
Joseph Campbell

He said myths and mythology wasn’t to give meaning to life but to give us an experience of life, an experience of vitality in being alive.
Joseph Campbell

When we quit thinking primarily about ourselves and our own self-preservation, we undergo a truly heroic transformation of consciousness.
Joseph Campbell
Topics: Thinking, Attitude

But in doing that, you save the world. The influence of a vital person vitalizes, there’s no doubt about it. The world without spirit is 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

Wisdom and foolishness are practically the same. Both are indifferent to the opinions of the world
Joseph Campbell
Topics: Fools

When I taught in a boy’s prep school, I used to talk to the boys who were trying to make up their minds as to what their careers were going to be. A boy would come to me and ask, “Do you think I can do this? Do you think I can do that? Do you think I can be a writer?” “Oh,” I would say, “I don’t know. Can you endure ten years of disappointment with nobody responding to you, or are you thinking that you are going to write a best seller the first crack? If you have the guts to stay with the thing you really want, no matter what happens, well, go ahead.
Joseph Campbell

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.
Joseph Campbell
Topics: Potential, Experience, Possibilities

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

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

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