Joseph Campbell
Every religion, every mythology is true in this sense: It is true as metaphorical of the human and cosmic mystery.Collection: Religion
The images of Myth are reflections of Spiritual and Depth potentialities of every one of us. Through contemplating those we evoke those powers in our own lives to operate through ourselves.Collection: Spiritual
There is a God inside my PC. An Old-Testament God with lots of arbitrary rules and utterly no mercy.Collection: Arbitrary
Man was not breathed into the earth. Man came out of the earth.Collection: Men
We have to permit go with the everyday living we had prepared so as to have the lifetime that's watching for usCollection: Everyday
The influence of a vital being vitalizes.Collection: Influence
To find your own way is to follow your bliss.Collection: Way
If you want to know what a given society believes in, look at what its largest buildings are devoted to.Collection: Believe
There is no make-believe about heaven, future bliss, and compensation, to alleviate the bitter majesty, but only utter darkness, the void of unfulfillment, to receive and eat back the lives that have been tossed forth from the womb only to fail.Collection: Believe
For people who are really alive to have life awakened is more important than to get a sandwich.Collection: Inspirational
For we have not even to risk the adventure alone, for the heros of all time have gone before us.Collection: Inspirational
The myth is the public dream and the dream is the private myth.Collection: Love
The function of (heroic) symbols is to give you a sense of Aha! Yes, I know what it is, it's myself.Collection: Giving
Myth is what we call other people's religion.Collection: Inspirational
Great Brahma from his mystic heaven groans, And all his priesthood moans.Collection: Heaven
Do what gives you bliss.Collection: Giving
Mythology tells us that where you stumble, there your treasure is ... The world is a match for us, and we’re a match for the world. And where it seems most challenging lies the greatest invitation to find deeper and greater power in ourselves.Collection: Lying
In the older view the goddess Universe was alive, herself organically the Earth, the horizon, and the heavens. Now she is dead, and the universe is not an organism, but a building, with gods at rest in it in luxury: not as personifications of the energies in their manners of operation, but as luxury tenants, requiring service. And Man, accordingly, is not as a child born to flower in the knowledge of his own eternal portion but as a robot fashioned to serve.Collection: Children
The usual marriage in traditional cultures was arranged for by the families. It wasn't a person-to-person decision at all. . . . In the Middle Ages, that was the kind of marriage that was sanctified by the Church. And so the troubadour idea of real person-to-person Amor was very dangerous. . . . It is in direct contradiction to the way of the Church. The word AMOR spelt backwards is ROMA, the Roman Catholic Church, which was justifying marriages that were simply political and social in their character. And so came this movement validating individual choice, what I call following your bliss.Collection: Real
Myths are public dreams, dreams are private myths. We must be willing to get rid of the life we planned, so as to have the life that is waiting for us. I have bought this wonderful machine — a computer ... it seems to me to be an Old Testament god, with a lot of rules and no mercy.Collection: Dream
All life stinks and you must embrace that with compassion.Collection: Inspirational
But the makers of legend have seldom rested content to regard the world's great heroes as mere human beings who broke past the horizons that limited their fellows and returned such boons as any man with equal faith and courage might have found.Collection: Inspirational
If you want to see what a society really believes in, look at what the biggest buildings on the horizon are dedicated to.Collection: Believe
Men sometimes confess they love war because it puts them in touch with the experience of being alive. In going to the office every day, you don't get that experience, but suddenly in war, you are ripped back into being alive. Life is pain; life is suffering; and life is horror - but, by God, you are alive.Collection: Pain
We are standing on a whale fishing for minnows.Collection: Whales
The function of ritual, as I understand it, is to give form to human life, not in the way of a mere surface arrangement, but in depth.Collection: Giving
The theme of the Grail is the bringing of life into what is known as 'the wasteland.' The wasteland is the preliminary theme to which the Grail is the answer. . . It's the world of people living inauthentic lives - doing what they are supposed to do.Collection: People
The last act in the biography of the hero is that of the death or departure.Collection: Hero
The person who thinks he has found the ultimate truth is wrong.Collection: Thinking
The notion of this universe, its heavens, hells, and everything within it, as a great dream dreamed by a single being in which all the dream characters are dreaming too, has in India enchanted and shaped the entire civilization.Collection: Dream
Now, when Luke Skywalker unmasks his father, he is taking off the machine role that the father has played. The father was the uniform. That is power, the state role.Collection: Inspirational
If a person does not listen to the demands of their own spiritual and heart life and insists on a certain program, you're going to have a schizophrenic crackup. The person has put themselves off center. They have aligned themselves with a programmatic life and it's not the one the body is interested in at all.Collection: Spiritual
The rise and fall of civilizations in the long, broad course of history can be seen to have been largely a function of the integrity and cogency of their supporting canons of myth; for not authority but aspiration is the motivator, builder, and transformer of civilization.Collection: Inspirational
They thought that it would be a disgrace to go forth as a group. Each entered the forest at a point that he himself had chosen, where it was darkest and there was no path. If there is a path it is someone else's path and you are not on the adventure.Collection: Adventure
There is no way you can use the word “reality” without quotation marks around it.Collection: Reality
There is what I would call the hero journey, the night sea journey, the hero quest, where the individual is going to bring forth in his life something that was never beheld before.Collection: Hero
The unfolding through time of all things from one is the simple message, finally, of every one of the creation myths reproduced in the pages of these volumes-including that of our contemporary biological view, which becomes an effective mythic image the moment we recognize its own inner mystery. By the same magic, every god that is dead can be conjured again to life, as any fragment of rock from a hillside, set respectfully in a garden, will arrest the eye.Collection: Eye
We are kept out of the Garden by our own fear and desire in relation to what we think to be the goods of our life.Collection: Fear
Now I found it in writing sentences. You can write that sentence in a way that you would have written it last year. Or you can write it in the way of the exquisite nuance that is sriting in your mind now. But that takes a lot of ... waiting for the right word to come.Collection: Inspirational
One of our problems today is that we are not well acquainted with the literature of the spirit. We re interested in the news of the day and the problems of the hour.Collection: News
Any god who can invent hell is no candidate for the Salvation ArmyCollection: God
I am Shiva-this is the great meditation of the yogis in the Himalayas...Hea ven and hell are within us, and all the gods are within us. This is the great realization of the Upanishads of India in the ninth century B.C. All the gods, all the heavens, all the worlds, are within us. They are magnified dreams, and dreams are manifestations in image form of the energies of the body in conflict with each other.Collection: Dream
Your own path you make with every step you take. That's why it's your path.Collection: Following Your Own Path
For the bliss of the deep abode is not lightly abandoned in favor of the self-scattering of the wakened state.Collection: Inspirational
Mythology is often defined as 'other peoples' religions', religion can be thought of as misinterpreted mythology.Collection: Mythology
Instead of clearing his own heart the zealot tries to clear the world.Collection: Inspirational
The best we can do is lean towards the light.Collection: Light
Our life evokes our character and you find out more about yourself as you go on.Collection: Character