Joseph Campbell Quotes (90 Quotes)

Mythology is not a lie, mythology is poetry, it is metaphorical. It has been well said that mythology is the penultimate truth--penultimate because the ultimate cannot be put into words. It is beyond words. Beyond images, beyond that bounding rim of the Buddhist Wheel of Becoming. Mythology pitches the mind beyond that rim, to what can be known but not told.

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.

For if anything is capable of making a poet of a literary man, it is my hometown love of the human, the living and ordinary.

I always feel uncomfortable when people speak about ordinary mortals because I've never met an ordinary man, woman or child.

Love is a friendship set to music.

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

Whenever the poetry of myth is interpreted as biography, history, or science, it is killed. The living images become only remote facts of a distant time or place. Furthermore, it is never difficult to demonstrate that as science and history, mythology is absurd.

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

We are kept out of the Garden by our own fear and desire in relation to what we think to be the goods of our life.

I had my heart set on three things One, the choral office two, the habit and community life. We spend a lot of time together. We work together, eat together, pray together,

When you see the Earth from space, you don't see any divisions of nation-states there. This may be the symbol of the new mythology to come this is the country we will celebrate, and these are the people we are one with.

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.

When you follow your bliss ... doors will open where you would not have thought there would be doors and where there wouldn't be adoor for anyone else.

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.

Myths are clues to the spiritual potentialities of the human life.

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

I have no doubt that I stand here at the very center of creation. Every fir tree, each of its needles, the movement of wind, all that I perceive and even more that I don't, all resonate with a vital hum. It is the hum of the universe, what the Chinese call the ten thousand things, all of them speaking out, saying precisely nothing. Each is its own center, the exact place where the world begins. The center is where you are standing, ... and the other center is where I am standing.

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 was a combination of a high rate of speed and an inexperienced driver. It's an unbelievable tragedy.

Follow your bliss and doors will open where there were no doors before.

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 think the person who takes a job in order to live - that is to say, for the money - has turned himself into a slave.

Original Experience has not been interpreted for you, and so youve got to work out life for yourself. Either you can take it or you cant. You dont have to go far off the interpreted path to find yourself in very difficult situations. The courage to face the trials and to bring a whole new body of possibilities into the field of interpreted experience for other people to experience that is the heros deed.

If You Are On Your Own Path Things Are Going To Come To You. Since It Is Your Own Path No One Has Ever Been On It Before, theres No Precedent, So Everything That Happens Is A Surprise Is Timely.

Given that we are still in early 2006, the 2007 guidance is likely to be conservative with higher-than-2006 airplane deliveries, better margins at both Boeing Commercial Airplanes and Integrated Defense Systems, strong cash flow, but low single-digit top line growth for its defense business.

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

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.

Follow your bliss.

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?

The myth is the public dream and the dream is the private myth. If your private myth, your dream, happens to coincide with that of the society, you are in good accord with your group. If it isn't, you've got an adventure in the dark forest ahead of you.

If marriage isn't a first priority in your life, you're not married.

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

When I was in India I met and conversed briefly with Shri Atmananda Guru of Trivandrum, and the question he gave me to ponder was this 'Where are you between two thoughts'

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

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

God is the experience of looking at a tree and saying, 'Ah'

However, if we are wrong and there is a strike, we would expect BA shares to trade down by 2 to 4 per share and we would consider that a buying opportunity.

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 are not going to change it. Our job is to straighten out our own lives.

The privilege of a lifetime is being who you are.

Space dedicated to creativity is the goal of artists of all kinds. Virginia Woolf lauded the room of one's own ... 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. . . This is the place of creative incubation . . . If you have a sacred place and use it, something eventually will happen.

Marriage is not a love affair. A love affair is a totally different thing. A marriage is a commitment to that which you are. That person is literally your other half. And you and the other are one. A love affair isnt that. That is a relationship of pleasure, and when it gets to be unpleasurable , its off. But a marriage is a life commitment, and a life commitment means the prime concern of your life. If marriage is not the prime concern, you are not married.

When you are required to exhibit strength, it comes.

The goal is to live with godlike composure on the full rush of energy, like Dionysus riding the leopard, without being torn to pieces.

The world is full of people that have stopped listening to themselves or have listened only their neighbors to learn what they ought to do, how they ought to behave, and what the values are they should be living for.

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.

The demon that you can swallow gives you its power, and the greater lifes pain, the greater lifes reply.

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

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 eternityright 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.

Love thine enemies because they are the instruments to your destiny.

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