Joseph Campbell Quotes

“People who don't have a concept of the whole can do very unfortunate things.”

“Follow your inner heart and the world moves in and helps.”

“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 a place where you can simply experience and bring forth what you are and what you might be.”

“The ultimate dragon is within you, it is your ego clamping you down.”

“In marriage you are not sacrificing yourself to the other person. You are sacrificing yourself to the relationship.”

“Poets are simply those who have made a profession and a lifestyle of being in touch with their bliss.”

“We are standing on a whale fishing for minnows.”

“To find your own way is to follow your bliss.”

“Life lives on life. This is the sense of the symbol of the Ouroboros, the serpent biting its tail. Everything that lives lives on the death of something else. Your own body will be food for something else. Anyone who denies this, anyone who holds back, is out of order. Death is an act of giving.”

“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.”

“You know the rule: If you are falling, dive. Do the thing that has to be done.”

“Opportunities to find deeper powers within ourselves come when lifeseems most challenging. Negativism to the pain and ferocity of life is negativism to life. We are not there until we can say 'yea' to it all.”

“You must have a place to which you can go in your heart, your mind, or your house, almost every day, where you do not owe anyone and where no one owes you - a place that simply allows for the blossoming of something new and promising.”

“Every moment is utterly unique and will not be continued in eternity. This fact gives life its poignancy and should concentrate your attention on what you are experiencing now...that source of eternal energy is here, in you, now.”

“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.”

“For people who are really alive to have life awakened is more important than to get a sandwich.”

“The cave you fear to enter holds the treasure you seek. Fear of the unknown is our greatest fear. Many of us would enter a tiger's lair before we would enter a dark cave. While caution is a useful instinct, we lose many opportunities and much of the adventure of life if we fail to support the curious explorer within us.”

“If you are to advance, all fixed ideas must go.”

“We save the world by being alive ourselves.”

“The adventure evoked a quality of his character that he didn't know he possessed.”

“We're in a freefall into future. We don't know where we're going. Things are changing so fast, and always when you're going through a long tunnel, anxiety comes along. And all you have to do to transform your hell into a paradise is to turn your fall into a voluntary act. It's a very interesting shift of perspective and that's all it is... joyful participation in the sorrows and everything changes.”

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

“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.”

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

“The concept of time shuts off eternity.”

“Man actually needs the striving and struggling for some goal worthy of him.”

“When you no longer are compelled by desire and fear . . . when you have seen the radiance in eternity from all forms of time . . . when you follow your bliss . . . doors will open where you would not have thought there were doors . . . and the world will step in and help.”

“You have to learn to recognize your own depth.”

“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.”

“Both the artist and the lover know that perfection is not loveable. It is the clumsiness of a fault that makes a person lovable.”

“Money is congealed energy, and releasing it releases life's possibilities.”

“There are something like 18 billion cells in the brain alone. There are no two brains alike; there are no two hands alike; there are no two human beings alike. You can take your instructions and your guidance from others, but you must find your own path.”

“I think that Jean Houston has broken through to a new understanding of the sense and uses of inward-turned contemplation-a n understanding that leaves the Freudian schools of technique and theory far behind. The accent is not on the curing of disease but on the enlargement, rather, of our health.”

“It [music] has an awakening function. Life is a rhythm. Art is an organization of rhythms. Music is a fundamental art that touches our will system. In Schopenhauer's The World as Will and Idea he speaks of music as the sound that awakens the will. The rhythm of the music awakens certain life rhythms, ways of living and experiencing life. So it's an awakener of life.”

“If you do 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... Follow your bliss and don't be afraid, and doors will open where you didn't know they were going to be.”

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

“One can experience an unconditional affirmation of life only when one has accepted death, not as contrary to life, but as an aspect of it.”

“If you can see your path clearly in front of you, it's probably someone else's.”

“Out of perfection nothing can be made. Every process involves breaking something up.”

“If the path before you is clear, you're probably on someone else's.”

“The ground of being is the ground of our being, and when we simply turn outward, we see all of these little problems here and there. But, if we look inward, we see that we are the source of them all.”

“For we have not even to risk the adventure alone, for the heros of all time have gone before us.”

“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 hero's deed.”

“You may have success in life, but then just think of it - what kind of life was it? What good was it - you've never done the thing you wanted to do in all your life. I always tell my students, go where your body and soul want to go. When you have the feeling, then stay with it, and don't let anyone throw you off.”

“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.”

“Heroism is a matter of integrity--beco ming more and more at each step ourselves.”

“The adventure is always and everywhere a passage beyond the veil of the known into the unknown; the powers that watch at the boundary are dangerous; to deal with them is risky; yet for anyone with competence and courage the danger fades.”

“I think a person who takes a job in order to live - that is to say, for the money - has turned himself into a slave. Work begins when you don't like what you're doing. There's a wise saying: make your hobby your source of income. Then there's no such thing as work, and there's no such thing as getting tired. That's been my own experience. I did just what I wanted to do. It takes a little courage at first, because who the hell wants you to do just what you want to do; they've all got lots of plans for you. But you can make it happen.”

“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.”

“A bit of advice Given to a young Native American At the time of his initiation: As you go the way of life, You will see a great chasm. Jump. It is not as wide as you think.”