Quotes by
Joseph Campbell |
1904-1987 , American academic
American professor of literature who was an expert in comparative mythology and comparative religion. His best-known work is his book The Hero with a Thousand Faces (1949), in which he discusses his theory of the journey of the archetypal hero shared by world mythologies, termed the monomyth. | 44 quotes | 2,535 visits |
Quotations
| • | 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. 11 |
| • | Wisdom and foolishness are practically the same. Both are indifferent to the opinions of the world. 9 |
| • | A hero is someone who has given his or her life to something bigger than oneself. 8 |
| • | Computers are like Old Testament gods; lots of rules and no mercy. 8 |
| • | Whatever the hell happens, say, “This is what I need.” 7 |
| • | Myths are public dreams, dreams are private myths. 6 |
| • | Passion will move men beyond themselves, beyond their shortcomings, beyond their failures. 5 |
| • | I don’t have to have faith, I have experience. 5 |
| • | You can't have creativity unless you leave behind the bounded, the fixed, all the rules. 4 |
| • | God is the experience of looking at a tree and saying, “Ah!” 3 |
| • | Heresy is the life of a mythology, and orthodoxy is the death. |
| • | 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. |
| • | If the path before you is clear, you're probably on someone else's. |
| • | People forget facts, but they remember stories. |
| • | If you are on the right path you will find that invisible hands are helping. |
| • | Respect your curses, for they are the instruments of your destiny. |
| • | The world is full of people who have stopped listening to themselves. |
| • | I have found that you have only to take that one step toward the gods, and they will then take ten steps toward you. That step, the heroic first step of the journey, is out of, or over the edge of, your boundaries, and it often must be taken before you know that you will. |
| • | Life is like arriving late for a movie, having to figure out what was going on without bothering everybody with a lot of questions, and then being unexpectedly called away before you find out how it ends. |
| • | Midlife is when you reach the top of the ladder and find that it was against the wrong wall. |
| • | I don't believe people are looking for the meaning of life as much as they are looking for the experience of being alive. |
| • | Eternity is not future or past. Eternity is a dimension of now. |
| • | All the gods, all the heavens, all the hells, are within you. |
| • | Opportunities to find deeper powers within ourselves come when life seems most challenging. |
| • | Myth is much more important and true than history. History is just journalism and you know how reliable that is. |
| • | When you are on your path, and it is truly your path, doors will open for you where there were no doors for someone else. |
| • | 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. |
| • | At the darkest moment comes the light. |
| • | You become mature when you become the authority of your own life. |
| • | You don't ask what a dance means. You enjoy it. You don't ask what the world means. You enjoy it. You don't ask what you mean. You enjoy it. |
| • | The myth does not point to a fact; the myth points beyond facts to something that informs the fact. |
| • | Find a place inside where there’s joy, and the joy will burn out the pain. |
| • | Vegetarians are people who cannot hear tomatos screaming. |
| • | Man should not be in the service of society, society should be in the service of man. When man is in the service of society, you have a monster state, and that's what is threatening the world at this minute. |
| • | Survival is the second law of life. The first is that we are all one. |
| • | The god you worship is the one you’re capable of becoming. |
| • | Religion is misunderstood mythology. |
| • | The very cave you are afraid to enter turns out to be the source of what you are looking for. The damned thing in the cave that was so dreaded has become the center. |
| • | I think of mythology as the homeland of the muses, the inspirers of art, the inspirers of poetry. To see life as a poem and yourself participating in a poem is what the myth does for you. |
| • | Myth is the secret opening through which the inexhaustible energies of the cosmos pour into human manifestation. |
| • | Questing... is not an ego trip; it is an adventure to bring into fulfillment your gift to the world, which is yourself. |
| • | The quest for fire occurred not because anyone knew what the practical uses for fire would be, but because it was fascinating. |
| • | Love your enemies, for they determine who you are. |
| • | The psychotic drowns in the same waters in which the mystic swims with delight. |
