Joseph Campbell Quotes

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

“I think it's important to live life with a knowledge of its mystery, and of your own mystery.”

“The mighty hero of extraordinary powers, able to lift Mount Govardhan on a finger, and to fill himself with the terrible glory of the universe, is each of us: not the physical self visible in the mirror, but the King within.”

“Love is the burning point of life, and since all life is sorrowful, so is love. The stronger the love, the more the pain. Love itself is pain, you might say -the pain of being truly alive.”

“He who thinks he knows, doesn't know. He who knows that he doesn't know, knows.”

“Nothing is exciting if you know what the outcome is going to be.”

“Their task [creative artists], therefore, is to communicate directly from one inward world to another, in such a way that an actual shock of experience will have been rendered: not a mere statement for the information or persuasion of a brain, but an effective communication across the void of space and time from one center of consciousness to another.”

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

“If you really want to help this world, what you will have to teach is how to live in it.”

“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.”

“When you are falling --- Dive!”

“The dance is the highest symbol of life itself.”

“What will they think of me? Must be put aside for bliss”

“The senses are a kind of reason. Taste, touch and smell, hearing and seeing, are not merely a means to sensation, enjoyable or otherwise, but they are also a means to knowledge - and are, indeed, your only actual means to knowledge.”

“You can't say life is useless because it ends in the grave.”

“If you see your path laid out in front of you - Step one, Step two, Step three - you only know one thing . . . it is not your path. Your path is created in the moment of action. If you can see it laid out in front of you, you can be sure it is someone else's path. That is why you see it so clearly.”

“Life is without meaning. You bring the meaning to it.”

“Love is exactly as strong as life.”

“There's something inside you that knows when you're in the center, that knows when you're on the beam or off the beam. And if you get off the beam to earn money, you've lost your life. And if you stay in the center and don't get any money, you still have your bliss.”

“The ego is as you think of yourself. You in relation to all the commitments of your life, as you understand them. The self is the whole range of possibilities that you've never even thought of. And you're stuck with you're past when you're stuck with the ego. Because if all you know about yourself is what you found out about yourself, well, that already happened. The self is a whole field of potentialities to come through.”

“You have been thinking one way. Now you have to think a different way.”

“The function of the society is to cultivate the individual. It is not the function of the individual to support society.”

“Dragons, you know, we have a good deal of biology and zoology about the dragon; we know their habits. The dragon tends to guard things, and he usually has these guarded in a cave... Now dragons don't know what to do either with beautiful girls or gold, but they just hang on. There are people like this. We call them creeps.”

“Nothing can happen to you that is not positive. Even though it looks and feels at the moment like a negative crisis, it is not. The crisis throws you back, and when you are required to exhibit strength, it comes.”

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