Joseph Campbell
It takes courage to do what you want. Other people have a lot of plans for you... Follow your bliss.Collection: Spiritual
Furthermore, we have not even to risk the adventure alone; for the heroes of all time have gone before us; the labyrinth is thoroughly known; we have only to follow the thread of the hero-path. And where we had thought to find an abomination, we shall find a god; where we had thought to slay another, we shall slay ourselves; where we had thought to travel outward, we shall come to the center of our own existence; and where we had thought to be alone, we shall be with all the world.Collection: Inspirational
You have been thinking one way. Now you have to think a different way.Collection: Thinking
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, you don’t know who your friends are, you don’t know what you owe anybody, you don’t know what anybody owes to you. This is a place where you can simply experience and bring forth what you are and what you might be. This is the place of creative incubation. At first you may find that nothing happens there. But if you have a sacred place and use it, something eventually will happen.Collection: Morning
All the gods, all the heavens, all the hells, are within you.Collection: Inspirational
If you do follow your bliss you put yourself on a kind of track that has been there all the while, waiting for you, and the life that you ought to be living is the one you are living... Follow your bliss and don't be afraid, and doors will open where you didn't know they were going to be.Collection: Inspirational
The way to find out about your happiness is to keep your mind on those moments when you feel most happy, when you really are happy-not excited, not just thrilled, but deeply happy. This requires a little bit of self analysis. What is it that makes you happy? Stay with it, no matter what people tell you. This is what I call "following your bliss."Collection: Happiness
Midlife is when you reach the top of the ladder and find that it was against the wrong wall.Collection: Life
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.Collection: Inspirational
How do you find the divine power in yourself? The word enthusiasm means 'filled with a god,' so what makes you enthusiastic? Follow it. So I have a little word: follow your bliss. The bliss is the message of God to yourself. That's where your life is.Collection: Mean
When everything is lost, and all seems darkness, then comes the new life and all that is needed.Collection: Life
Well, one of the problems about being psychoanalyzed is, as Nietzsche said, "Be careful lest in casting out your devils that you cast out the best thing that's in you." So many people who are really in deep analysis look as though and act as though they have been filleted. There's no bone there, there's no stuff! 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
Dragons, you know, we have a good deal of biology and zoology about the dragon; we know their habits. The dragon tends to guard things, and he usually has these guarded in a cave... Now dragons don't know what to do either with beautiful girls or gold, but they just hang on. There are people like this. We call them creeps.Collection: Beautiful
Behind all these manifestations is the one radiance, which shines through all things.Collection: Shining
The adventure is always and everywhere a passage beyond the veil of the known into the unknown; the powers that watch at the boundary are dangerous; to deal with them is risky; yet for anyone with competence and courage the danger fades.Collection: Adventure
You've got to find the force inside you.Collection: Intuition
Love is perfect kindness.Collection: Love
Eternity isn't some later time. Eternity isn't a long time. Eternity has nothing to do with time. Eternity is that dimension of here and now which thinking and time cuts out. This is it. And if you don't get it here, you won't get it anywhere. And the experience of eternity right here and now is the function of life.Collection: Cutting
The psychotic drowns in the same waters in which the mystic swims with delight.Collection: Water
If you're going to have a story, have a big story, or none at all.Collection: Inspirational
Religon is misunderstood mythologyCollection: Misunderstood
The quest for fire occurred not because anyone knew what the practical uses for fire would be, but because it was fascinating.Collection: Fire
The fates lead him who will; him who won't they drag.Collection: Inspirational
Every hero must have the courage to be alone, to take the journey for himself.Collection: Hero
This, I believe, is the great Western truth: that each of us is a completely unique creature and that, if we are ever to give any gift to the world, it will have to come out of our own experience and fulfillment of our own potentialities, not someone else's.Collection: Believe
The warrior’s approach is to say ‘yes’ to life: ‘yes’ to it all.Collection: Warrior
The less there is of you, the more you experience the sublime.Collection: Sublime
If you want resurrection, you must have crucifixion... The hoarder, the one in us that wants to keep, to hold on, must be killed.Collection: Want
What we are really living for is the experience of life, both the pain and the pleasure.Collection: Inspirational
The psychological dangers through which earlier generations were guided by the symbols and spiritual exercises of their mythological and religious inheritance, we today (in so far as we are unbelievers, or, if believers, in so far as our inherited beliefs fail to represent the real problems of contemporary life) must face alone, or, at best with only tentative, impromptu, and not often very effective guidance. This is our problem as modern, "enlightened" individuals, for whom all gods and devils have been rationalized out of existence.Collection: Inspirational
The achievement of the hero is one that he is ready for and it's really a manifestation of his character. It's amusing the way in which the landscape and conditions of the environment match the readiness of the hero. The adventure that he is ready for is the one that he gets.Collection: Hero
All we really want to do is dance.Collection: Want
You may have success in life, but then just think of it - what kind of life was it? What good was it - you've never done the thing you wanted to do in all your life. 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: Thinking
The idea of Buddha consciousness is that all beings are Buddha beings, and your whole function in meditation and everything else is to find that Buddha consciousness within and live out of that, instead of the interests of the eyes and ears.Collection: Yoga
There is a condescension on the part of the infinite to the mind of man. That is what looks like God.Collection: Men
The priests used to say that faith can move mountains, and nobody believed them. Today the scientists say that they can level mountains, and nobody doubts them.Collection: Moving
One can experience an unconditional affirmation of life only when one has accepted death, not as contrary to life, but as an aspect of it.Collection: Affirmation
Enlarge the pupil of the eye, so that the body with its attendant personality will no longer obstruct the view. Immortality is then experienced as a present fact.Collection: Inspirational
Mephistopheles, the machine man, can provide us with all the means, and is thus likely to determine the aims of life as well. But of course the characteristic of Faust, which makes him eligible to be saved, is that he seeks aims that are not those of the machine.Collection: Inspirational
The seizure of passionate love can be, in such a context, only illicit, breaking in upon the order of one's dutiful life in virtue as a devastating storm.Collection: Passion
I don't have faith, I have experience.Collection: Have Faith
Truth is one, the sages speak of it by many names.Collection: Inspiration
What gods are there, what gods have there ever been, that were not from man's imagination?Collection: Men
Mythology is the womb of mankind's initiation to life and death.Collection: Life
There are now no more horizons. And with the dissolution of horizons we have experienced and are experiencing collisions, terrific collisions, not only of peoples but also of their mythologies. It is as when dividing panels are withdrawn from between chambers of very hot and very cold airs: there is a rush of these forces together.Collection: Inspirational
The schizophrenic is drowning in the same waters in which the mystic swims with delight. Edgar Cayce made the same observation in his readingsCollection: Reading
A temple is a landscape of the soul.Collection: Soul
He must put aside his pride, his virtue, beauty and life and bow or submit to the absolutely intolerable.Collection: Inspirational