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.
—Joseph Campbell
Topics: Religion
When everything is lost, and all seems darkness, then comes the new life and all that is needed.
—Joseph Campbell
Topics: New, Life
The less there is of you, the more you experience the sublime.
—Joseph Campbell
Topics: Experience
You know the rule: If you are falling, dive.
—Joseph Campbell
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, Life, Kind, Follow, People
Myths are clues to the spiritual potentialities of the human life
—Joseph Campbell
The black moment is the moment when the real message of transformation is going to come. At the darkest moment comes the light.
—Joseph Campbell
Topics: Light
What am I? Am I the bulb that carries the light, or am I the light of which the bulb is a vehicle?
—Joseph Campbell
An old Apache storyteller reminds us: “The plants, rocks, fire, water, all are alive. They watch us and see our needs. They see when we have nothing to protect us, and it is then that they reveal themselves and speak to us.”
—Joseph Campbell
Topics: Nature
The privilege of a lifetime is being who you are.
—Joseph Campbell
Topics: Individuality
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
Out of perfection nothing can be made. Every process involves breaking something up.
—Joseph Campbell
Topics: Perfection
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
A hero is someone who has given his or her life to something bigger than oneself.
—Joseph Campbell
Topics: Heroism, Heroes
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
Where you stumble, there your treasure lies.
—Joseph Campbell
Marriage is not a simple love affair, it’s an ordeal, and the ordeal is the sacrifice of ego to a relationship in which two have become one
—Joseph Campbell
Topics: Marriage
Freud tells us to blame our parents for all the shortcomings of our life, Marx tells us to blame the upper class of our society. But the only one to blame is oneself.
—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: Attitude, Thinking
The ultimate dragon is within you.
—Joseph Campbell
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 piritual identity.
—Joseph Campbell
Topics: Divorce
Myths are public dreams, dreams are private myths.
—Joseph Campbell
Topics: Dreams
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
If you follow your bliss, doors will open for you that wouldn’t have opened for anyone else.
—Joseph Campbell
Topics: Passion
If you want to find out what it means to have a society without any rituals, read the New York Times.
—Joseph Campbell
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
The dark night of the soul comes just before revelation.
—Joseph Campbell
Topics: Soul
To find your own way is to follow your bliss. This involves analysis, watching yourself and seeing where real deep bliss is—not the quick little excitement , but the real deep, life-filling bliss.
—Joseph Campbell
Topics: Excitement
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
Wondering Whom to Read Next?
- Susan Sontag American Writer, Philosopher
- Lloyd Alexander American Writer
- E. L. Doctorow American Novelist
- Tim Robbins American Actor, Director
- Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis American First Lady
- Abbie Hoffman American Political Activist
- Allen Ginsberg American Poet
- Lillian Gish American Actress
- Billy Collins American Poet
- Cynthia Ozick American Novelist, Essayist
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