Joseph Campbell
Where is your bliss station? You have to try to find it.Collection: Trying
When your mind is simply trapped by the image out there so that you never make the reference to yourself, you have misread the image.Collection: Understanding
When before the beauty of a sunset or a mountain, you pause and exclaim, 'Ah,' you are participating in divinity.Collection: Sunset
If we fix on the old, we get stuck.Collection: Stuck
What am I? Am I the bulb that carries the light, or am I the light of which the bulb is a vehicle?Collection: Light
Thinking in mythological terms helps to put you in accord with the inevitables of this vale of tears. You learn to recognize the positive values in what appear to be the negative moments and aspects of your life. The big question is whether you are going to be able to say a hearty yes to your adventure.Collection: Adventure
When you find a writer who really is saying something to you, read everything that writer has written and you will get more education and depth of understanding out of that than reading a scrap here and a scrap there and elsewhere. Then go to people who influenced that writer, or those who were related to him, and your world builds together in an organic way that is really marvelous.Collection: Reading
Our demons are our own limitations, which shut us off from the realization of the ubiquity of the spirit . . . each of these demons is conquered in a vision quest.Collection: Ubiquity
What is required is the finding of that Immovable Point within one's self, which is not shaken by any of those tempests which the Buddhists call 'the eight karmic winds': 1-fear of pain, 2-desire for pleasure; 3-fear of loss; 4-desire for gain; 5-fear of blame, 6-desire for praise; 7-fear of disgrace; [and] 8-desire for fame.Collection: Karma
The world, as we know it, is coming to an end. The world as the center of the universe, the world divided from the heavens, the world bound by horizons in which love is reserved for members of the in-group: that is the world that is passing away. Apocalypse does not point to a fiery Armageddon but to the fact that our ignorance and complacency are coming to an end.Collection: Ignorance
The object becomes aesthetically significant when it becomes metaphysically significant.Collection: Significant
It's a shame to waste [the uniqueness that is you], by doing what someone else has done.Collection: Done
When you realize that eternity is right here now, that it is within your possibility to experience the eternity of your own truth and being, then you grasp the following: That which you are was never born and will never die. . . . (90)Collection: Inspirational
I think what we lack isn't science, but poetry that reveals what the heart is ready to recognizeCollection: Heart
Your life is the fruit of your own doing. You have no one to blame but yourself... The problem is not to blame or explain but to handle the life that arises... If you say no to a single factor in your life, you have unraveled the whole thing... The demon that you swallow gives you its power, and the greater life's pain, the greater life's reply.Collection: Pain
This is an important point about symbols: they do not refer to historical events; they refer through historical events to spiritual or psychological principles and powers that are of yesterday, today, and tomorrow, and that are everywhere.Collection: Spiritual
If marriage isn't a first priority in your life, you're not married.Collection: Life
Perhaps some of us have to go through dark and devious ways before we can find the river of peace or the highroad to the soul's destination.Collection: Inspirational
Hell is life drying up.Collection: Hell
The happy ending of the fairy tale, the myth, and the divine comedy of the soul, is to be read, not as a contradiction, but as a transcendence of the universal tragedy of man. The objective world remains what it was, but, because of a shift of emphasis within the subject, is beheld as though transformed. Where formerly life and death contended, now enduring being is made manifest-as indifferent to the accidents of time as water boiling in a pot is to the destiny of a bubble, or as the cosmos to the appearance and disappearance of a galaxy of stars.Collection: Stars
A ritual is the enactment of a myth. And, by participating in the ritual, you are participating in the myth. And since myth is a projection of the depth wisdom of the psyche, by participating in a ritual, participating in the myth, you are being, as it were, put in accord with that wisdom, which is the wisdom that is inherent within you anyhow. Your consciousness is being re-minded of the wisdom of your own life.Collection: Depth
Shakespeare said that art is a mirror held up to nature. And that’s what it is. The nature is your nature, and all of these wonderful poetic images of mythology are referring to something in you. When your mind is trapped by the image out there so that you never make the reference to yourself, you have misread the image.Collection: Nature
At such moments, you realize that you and the other are, in fact, one. It's a big realization. Survival is the second law of life. The first is that we are all one.Collection: Law
When you go through life ... it all seems accidental at the time it is happening. Then when you get on in your 60s or 70s and look back, your life looks like a well-planned novel with a coherent theme ... Incidents that seemed accidental, pure chance, turn out to be major elements in the structuring of this novel. Schopenhauer says, 'Who wrote this novel? You did.'Collection: Looks
Life is a guy trying to play a violin solo in public, while learning the music and his instrument at the same time.Collection: Play
Preachers err by trying to talk people into belief; better they reveal the radiance of their own discovery.Collection: Inspirational
As Freud has shown, blunders are not the merest chance. They are the result of suppressed desires and conflicts. They are ripples on the surface of life, produced by unsuspected springs. And these may be very deep - as deep as the soul itself. The blunder may amount to the opening of a destiny.Collection: Spring
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.Collection: Bliss
A hero is not a champion of things become, but of things becoming; the dragon to be slain by him is precisely the monster of the status quo.Collection: Hero
You have to learn to recognize your own depth.Collection: Depth
It is within you that the divine lives.Collection: Love
Poets and artists who speak of the mystery are rare.Collection: Artist
Sometimes the serpent is represented as a circle eating its own tail. That’s an image of life. Life sheds one generation after another, to be born again. The serpent represents immortal energy and consciousness engaged in the field of time, constantly throwing off death and being born again. There is something tremendously terrifying about life when you look at it that way. And so the serpent carries in itself the sense of both the fascination and the terror of life.Collection: Circles
You can't have creativity unless you leave behind the bounded, the fixed, all the rulesCollection: Creativity
The call to adventure is the point in a person’s life when they are first given notice that everything is going to change, whether they know it or not.Collection: Adventure
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.Collection: Inspirational
It is not society which is to guide and save the creative hero, but precisely the reverse.Collection: Hero
God is within you. You yourself are your creator. If you find that place in yourself from which you brought this thing about, you will be able to live with it and affirm it, perhaps even enjoy it, as your life.Collection: God
The function of the society is to cultivate the individual. It is not the function of the individual to support society.Collection: Support
The best things cannot be told, the second best are misunderstood. After that comes civilized conversation; after that, mass indoctrination; after that, intercultural exchange.Collection: Misunderstood
It's only when a man tames his own demons that he becomes the king of himself if not of the world.Collection: Kings
Myth must be kept alive. The people who can keep it alive are the artists of one kind or another.Collection: Inspirational
Follow your inner heart and the world moves in and helps.Collection: Moving
If there were already a path, it would have to be someone else's; the whole point is to find your own way.Collection: Inspirational
When you follow your bliss a kind of track opens up, that's always been there, waiting for you. And the life that you should be living, is the one that you will be living.Collection: Life
If you want the whole thing, the gods will give it to you. But you must be ready for it.Collection: Inspirational
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.Collection: Life
The hero journey is inside of you; tear off the veils and open the mystery of your self.Collection: Hero
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.Collection: Unique