Joseph Campbell
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.Collection: Morning
Mythology helps you to identify the mysteries of the energies pouring through you. Therein lies your eternity.Collection: Lying
Money is congealed energy and releasing it releases life possibilities ... Money experienced as life energy is indeed a meditation, and letting it flow out instead of hoarding it is a mode of participation in the life of others.Collection: Meditation
Man actually needs the striving and struggling for some goal worthy of him.Collection: Stress
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.Collection: Feelings
All men are capable of reason. That is the fundamental principle of democracy Because everybody's mind is capable of true knowledge, you don't have to have a special authority, or a special revelation telling you that this is the way things should be.Collection: Men
The black moment is the moment when the real message of transformation is going to come. At the darkest moment comes the light.Collection: Inspirational
When you translate the Bible with excessive literalism, you demythologize it. The possibility of a convincing reference to the individual's own spiritual experience is lost. (111)Collection: Inspirational
What is unknown is the fulfillment of your own unique life, the likes of which has never existed on earth. And you are the only one who can do it. People can give you clues how to fall and when to stand, and when you are falling and when you are standing, this only you can know. And in the way of your own talents is the only way to do it.Collection: Fall
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.Collection: Inspirational
In the Orient the ultimate divine mystery is sought beyond all human categories of thought and feeling, beyond names and forms, and absolutely beyond any such concept as of a merciful or wrathful personality, chooser of one people over another, comforter of folk who pray, and destroyer of those who do not. Such anthropomorphic attributions of human sentiments and thoughts to a mystery beyond thought is-from the point of view of Indian thought-a style of religion for children.Collection: Children
And so Galahad decided that it would be a disgrace to set off on a quest with the other knights. Alone he would enter the dark forest where there was no path. This is the myth of The Hero's Journey.Collection: Hero
The job of an educator is to teach students to see vitality in themselvesCollection: Inspirational
Seek to know the power that is within you.Collection: Power
The night of December 25, to which date the Nativity of Christ was ultimately assigned, was exactly that of the birth of the Persian savior Mithra, who, as an incarnation of eternal light, was born the night of the winter solstice (then dated December 25) at midnight, the instant of the turn of the year from increasing darkness to light.Collection: Winter
Oh my God, does art engender humanity? It awakens your humanity. But humanity has nothing to do with political theory. Political theory is in the interests of one group of humanity, or one ideal for humanity. But humanity-my heavens, that's what proper art renders. We have a paradox. Going into the deepest aspects of inner space connects you with something that is the most vital for the outer realm.Collection: Art
Heinrich Zimmerhe had a little saying : The best things cant be told - because they are transcendent, inexpressible truths. The second best are misunderstood : myths, which are metaphoric attempts to point to the way toward the first. And the third best have to do with history, science, biography, and so on. The only kind of talking that can be understood is this last kind.Collection: Talking
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.Collection: Inspirational
Where there is a way or path, it is someone else's. Each of us has to find his own way.Collection: Way
It would not be too much to say that myth is the secret opening through which the inexhaustible energies of the cosmos pour into human cultural manifestation. Religions, philosophies, arts, the social forms of primitive and historic man, prime discoveries in science and technology, the very dreams that blister sleep, boil up from the basic, magic ring of myth.Collection: Dream
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?Collection: Two
One great thing about growing old is that nothing is going to lead to anything. Everything is of the moment.Collection: Growing
Mythological symbols touch and exhilarate centers of life beyond the reach of vocabularies of reason and coercion.Collection: Vocabulary
In choosing your god, you choose your way of looking at the universe. There are plenty of Gods. Choose yours.Collection: Way
Follow your bliss and don't be afraid, and door will open where you didn't know they were going to be.Collection: Positive
I prefer the gradual path My feeling is that mythic forms reveal themselves gradually in the course of your life if you know what they are and how to pay attention to their emergence. My own initiation into the mythic depths of the unconscious has been through the mind, through the books that surround me in this library. I have recognized in my quest all the stages of the hero's journey. I had my calls to adventure, my guides, demons, and illuminations.Collection: Book
There's always the possibility of a fiasco. But there's also the possibility of bliss.Collection: Bliss
Christianity isn’t moving people’s lives today. What’s moving people’s lives is the stock market and the baseball scores. What are people excited about? It’s a totally materialistic level that has taken over the world. There isn’t even an ideal that anybody’s fighting for.Collection: Inspirational
I think it's important to live life with a knowledge of its mystery, and of your own mystery.Collection: Live Life
Don't do anything that isn't playCollection: Communication
Life is but a mask worn on the face of death. And is death, then, but another mask? 'How many can say,' asks the Aztec poet, 'that there is, or is not, a truth beyond?'Collection: Aztec
Life, in both its knowing and its doing, has become today a "free fall," so to say, into the next minute, into the future. So that, whereas, formerly, those not wishing to hazard the adventure of an individual life could rest within the pale of a comfortably guaranteed social order, today all the walls have burst. It is not left to us to chooseto hazard the adventure of an unprecedented life: adventure is upon us, like a tidal wave.Collection: Wall
You are the Hero of your own Story.Collection: Hero
Every act has both good and evil results. The best we can do is lean to the light.Collection: Light
Myths are clues to the spiritual potentialities of the human life.Collection: Life
The problem of making the inner meet the outer of today is, of course, the function of the artist.Collection: Artist
What we're learning in our schools is not the wisdom of life. We're learning technologies, we're getting information. There's a curious reluctance on the part of faculties to indicate the life values of their subjects.Collection: Inspirational
The process of nature cannot be evil.Collection: Evil
If you want to change the world, you have to change the metaphor.Collection: Inspirational
You have to have a feeling for where you are. You've got only one life to live and you don't have to live it for six people. Pay attention to it.Collection: People
The Navajo have that wonderful image of what they call the pollen path. The Navajo say, 'Oh, beauty before me, beauty behind me, beauty to the right of me, beauty to the left of me, beauty above me, beauty below me, I'm on the pollen path.'Collection: Path
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.Collection: Inspirational
Money is congealed energy, and releasing it releases life's possibilities.Collection: Energy
This is an essential experience of any mystical realization. You die to your flesh and are born into your spirit. You identify yourself with the consciousness and life of which your body is but the vehicle. You die to the vehicle and become identified in your consciousness with that of which the vehicle is but the carrier. That is the God.Collection: Essentials
We are the consciousness of the earth. We are the eyes of the earth. The voice of the earth.Collection: Eye
I think of compassion as the fundamental religious experience and, unless that is there, you have nothing.Collection: Religious
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.Collection: Inspirational
Myth is much more important and true than history. History is just journalism and you know how reliable that is.Collection: Inspirational
It is the function of art to carry us beyond speech to experience.Collection: Art