Joseph Campbell
Revolution doesn't have to do with smashing something, it has to do with bringing something forth. If you spend all your time thinking about that which you are attacking, then you are negatively bound to it. You have to find the zeal in yourself and bring that out.Collection: Inspirational
When you follow your bliss, you begin to meet people who are in the field of your bliss, and they open the doors to you.Collection: Doors
The eternal principle, which never was born, never will die: it is in all things: it is in you now. You are the wave on the face of the ocean. When the wave is gone, is the water gone? Has anything happened? Nothing has happened. It is a play, a game, a dance.Collection: Ocean
Survival is the second law of life. The first is that we are all one.Collection: Law
The old skin has to be shed before the new one can come.Collection: Inspirational
What if we choose not to do the things we are supposed to do? The principal gain is a sense of an authentic act - and an authentic life. It may be a short one, but it is an authentic one, and that's a lot better than those short lives full of boredom. The principal loss is security. Another is respect from the community. But you gain the respect of another community, the one that is worth having the respect of.Collection: Life
Eternity is not future or past. Eternity is a dimension of now.Collection: Future
Change the focus of the eye. When you have done that, then the end of the world as you formerly knew it will have occurred, and you will experience the radiance of the divine presence everywhere, here and now.Collection: Eye
If you are to advance, all fixed ideas must go.Collection: Ideas
Sacred space and sacred time and something joyous to do is all we need. Almost anything then becomes a continuous and increasing joy. What you have to do, you do with play. I think a good way to conceive of sacred space is as a playground. If what you're doing seems like play, you are in it. But you can't play with my toys, you have to have your own. Your life should have yielded some. Older people play with life experiences and realizations or with thoughts they like to entertain. In my case, I have books I like to read that don't lead anywhere.Collection: Life
Anything you do has a still point. When you are in that still point, you can perform maximally.Collection: Stills
The dark night of the soul comes just before revelation.Collection: Dark
Read myths. They teach you that you can turn inward, and you begin to get the message of the symbols. Read other people's myths, not those of your own religion, because you tend to interpret your own religion in terms of facts -- but if you read the other ones, you begin to get the message.Collection: People
Writer’s block results from too much head. Cut off your head. Pegasus, poetry, was born of Medusa when her head was cut off. You have to be reckless when writing. Be as crazy as your conscience allows.Collection: Inspirational
Everything starts with a story.Collection: Stories
For when the heart insists on its destiny, resisting the general blandishment, then the agony is great; so too the danger. Forces, however, will have been set in motion beyond the reckoning of the senses. Sequences of events from the corners of the world will draw gradually together, and miracles of coincidence bring the inevitable to pass.Collection: Heart
A hero ventures forth from the world of common day into a region of supernatural wonder. Fabulous forces are there encountered and a decisive victory is won.Collection: Hero
There is an Indian fable of three beings who drank from a river: one was a god, and he drank ambrosia; one was a man, and he drank water; and one was a demon, and he drank filth. What you get is a function of your own consciousness.Collection: Men
Poetry comes out of an elite experience, the experience of people whose ears are opened to the song of the universe.Collection: Song
"Make your god transparent to the transcendent, and it doesn't matter what his name is."Collection: Inspirational
Awe is what moves us forward.Collection: Moving
The Garden is a metaphor for the following: our minds, and our thinking in terms of pairs of opposites--man and woman, good and evil--are as holy as that of a god. (50)Collection: Men
What will they think of me? Must be put aside for blissCollection: Communication
Out of perfection nothing can be made. Every process involves breaking something up.Collection: Perfection
If you can see your path laid out in front of you step by step, you know it's not your path. Your own path you make with every step you take. That's why it's your path.Collection: Inspirational
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.Collection: Inspirational
The Greeks, it will be recalled, regarded Eros, the god of love, as the eldest of the gods; but also as the youngest, born fresh and dewy-eyed in every living heart.Collection: Heart
You know, I didn't write my books for critics and scholars. I wrote them for students and artists. When I hear how much my work has meant to them--well, I can't tell you how happy that makes me. That means that this great stuff of myth, which I have been so privileged to work with, will be kept alive for a whole new generation. That's the function of the artists, you know, to reinterpret the old stories and make them come alive again, in poetry, painting, and now in movies.Collection: Book
Mythology is not a lie, mythology is poetry, it is metaphorical. It has been well said that mythology is the penultimate truth--penultimate because the ultimate cannot be put into words. It is beyond words. Beyond images, beyond that bounding rim of the Buddhist Wheel of Becoming. Mythology pitches the mind beyond that rim, to what can be known but not told.Collection: Buddhist
Through dreams a door is opened to mythology, since myths are of the nature of dreams, and that, as dreams arise from an inward world unknown to waking consciousness, so do myths: so, indeed, does life.Collection: Dream
Mythology may, in a real sense, be defined as other people's religion. And religion may, in a sense, be understood as popular misunderstanding of mythology. (8)Collection: Inspirational
Mythologies, in other words, mythologies and religions are great poems and, when recognized as such, point infallibly through things and events to the ubiquity of aCollection: Ubiquity
Myths are so intimately bound to culture, time, and place that unless the symbols, the metaphors, are kept alive by constant recreation through the arts, the life just slips away from them.Collection: Art
Half the people in the world think that the metaphors of their religious traditions, for example, are facts. And the other half contends that they are not facts at all. As a result we have people who consider themselves believers because they accept metaphors as facts, and we have others who classify themselves as atheists because they think religious metaphors are lies.Collection: Inspirational
The entire heavenly realm is within us, but to find it we have to relate to what's outside.Collection: Realms
There seem to be only two kinds of people: Those who think that metaphors are facts, and those who know that they are not facts. Those who know they are not facts are what we call "atheists," and those who think they are facts are "religious." Which group really gets the message?Collection: Inspirational
There is no security in following the call to adventure.Collection: Adventure
The folktale is the primer of the picture-language of the soul.Collection: Soul
The dance is the highest symbol of life itself.Collection: Symbols
The function of artists is "the mythologization of the world."Collection: Artist
Privation and suffering alone open the mind to all that is hidden to others. (Igjugarjuk)Collection: Mind
Participate joyfully in the sorrows of lifeCollection: Sorrow
The sin of inadvertence, not being alert, not quite awake, is the sin of missing the moment of life-live with unremitting alertness.Collection: Missing
We know that Jesus could not have ascended to heaven because there is no physical heaven anywhere in the universe. Even ascending at the speed of light, Jesus would still be in the galaxy.Collection: Jesus
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.Collection: Hero
A sound precipitates air, then fire, then water and earth- and that's how the world becomes.Collection: Air
When you are falling --- Dive!Collection: Fall
And if there was no Fall, what then of the need for Redemption? What god was offended and by whom? Some especially touchy cave bear whose skull had been improperly enshrined?Collection: Inspirational
I don't need faith. I have experience.Collection: Inspirational