If you follow your bliss, doors will open for you that wouldn’t have opened for anyone else.
—Joseph Campbell
Topics: Passion
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 It is as when dividing panels are withdrawn from between chambers of very hot and very cold airs: there is a rush of these forces together.
—Joseph Campbell
Topics: Progress
Love is a friendship set to music.
—Joseph Campbell
Topics: Friendship, Love
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
God is an intelligible sphere—a sphere known to mind, not to the senses—whose center is everywhere and whose circumference nowhere.
—Joseph Campbell
To separate oneself or one.
—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
You know the rule: If you are falling, dive.
—Joseph Campbell
Eternity has nothing to do with the hereafter… This is it… If you don’t get it here, you won’t get it anywhere. The experience of eternity right here and now is the function of life. Heaven is not the place to have the experience; here’s the place to have the experience.
—Joseph Campbell
Topics: Heaven
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
Economics and politics are the governing powers of life today, and that’s why everything is so screwy.
—Joseph Campbell
Topics: Economics
When everything is lost, and all seems darkness, then comes the new life and all that is needed.
—Joseph Campbell
Topics: New, Life
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
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
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
Myths are clues to the spiritual potentialities of the human life.
—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
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
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
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
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
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
Where you stumble, there your treasure lies.
—Joseph Campbell
Myths are public dreams, dreams are private myths.
—Joseph Campbell
Topics: Dreams
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
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
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
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
When you make the sacrifice in marriage, you’re sacrificing not to each other but to unity in a relationship.
—Joseph Campbell
Topics: Unity
A hero is someone who has given his or her life to something bigger than oneself.
—Joseph Campbell
Topics: Heroism, Heroes
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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