Joseph Campbell
What I think is that a good life is one hero journey after another. Over and over again, you are called to the realm of adventure, you are called to new horizons. Each time, there is the same problem: do I dare? And then if you do dare, the dangers are there, and the help also, and the fulfillment or the fiasco. There's always the possibility of fiasco. But there's also the possibility of bliss.Collection: Good Life
No tribal rite has yet been recorded which attempts to keep winter from descending; on the contrary: the rites all prepare the community to endure, together with the rest of nature, the season of the terrible cold.Collection: Inspirational
Now all the myths that you have heard and that resonate with you, those are the elements from round about that you are building into a form in your life. The thing worth considering is how they relate to each other in your context, not how they relate to something out there-how they were relevant on the North American prairies or in the Asian jungles hundreds of years agon, but how they are relevant now-unless by contemplating their former meaning you can begin to amplify your own understanding of the role they play in your life.Collection: Years
A woman is a vehicle of life. Life has overtaken her. Woman is what it is all about-the giving of birth and the giving of nourishment.Collection: Women
If you go to a master to study and learn the techniques, you diligently follow all the instructions the master puts upon you. But then comes the time for using the rules in your own way and not being bound by them....You can actually forget the rules because they have been assimilated. You are an artist. Your own innocence now is of one who has become an artist, who has been, as it were, transmuted.... You can't have creativity unless you leave behind the bounded, the fixed, all the rules.Collection: Creativity
God is the experience of looking at a tree and saying, 'Ah!Collection: Inspirational
When you are in accord with nature, nature will yield its bounty. This is something that is coming up in our own consciousness now...recognizi ng that by violating the environment in which we are living, we are really cutting off the energy and source of our own living. And it’s this sense of accord, so that living properly in relation to what has to be done in this world one fosters the vitality of the environment.Collection: Cutting
Myths are stories for our search through the ages for truth, for meaning, for significance. We all need to tell our story and to understand our story. We all need to understand death and to cope with death, and we all need help in our passages from birth to live and then to death. We need for life to signify, to touch the eternal, to understand the mysterious, to find out who we are.Collection: Age
We're in a freefall into future. We don't know where we're going. Things are changing so fast, and always when you're going through a long tunnel, anxiety comes along. And all you have to do to transform your hell into a paradise is to turn your fall into a voluntary act. It's a very interesting shift of perspective and that's all it is... joyful participation in the sorrows and everything changes.Collection: Inspirational
You must have a place to which you can go in your heart, your mind, or your house, almost every day, where you do not owe anyone and where no one owes you - a place that simply allows for the blossoming of something new and promising.Collection: Heart
Let the world be as it is and learn to rock with the waves.Collection: Rocks
At the darkest moment comes the light.Collection: Light
You've got to say yes to this miracle of life as it is, not on condition that it follow your rules.Collection: Knowing Who You Are
I have found that you have only to take that one step toward the gods, and they will then take ten steps toward you. That step, the heroic first step of the journey, is out of, or over the edge of, your boundaries, and it often must be taken before you know that you will.Collection: Taken
People say that what we're all seeking is a meaning for life. I don't think that's what we're really seeking. I think what we're seeking is an experience of being alive, so that our life experiences on the purely physical plane will have resonance within our own innermost being and reality, so that we actually feel the rapture of being alive.Collection: Inspirational
Marriage is not a love affair. A love affair has to do with immediate personal satisfaction. Marriage is an ordeal; it means yielding, time and again. That's why it's a sacrament; You give up your personal simplicity to participate in a relationship. And when you're giving, you're not giving to the other person; you're giving to the relationship.Collection: Giving Up
Your adventure has to be coming out of your own interior. If you are ready for it then doors will open where there were no doors before, and where there would not be doors for anyone else. And you must have courage. It's the call to adventure, which means there is no security, no rules.Collection: Adventure
We're not on our journey to save the world but to save ourselves. But in doing that you save the world. The influence of a vital person vitalizes.Collection: Inspirational
The conquest of fear yields the courage of life. That is the cardinal initiation of every heroic adventure-- fearlessness and achievement.Collection: Adventure
I think a person who takes a job in order to live - that is to say, for the money - has turned himself into a slave. Work begins when you don't like what you're doing. There's a wise saying: make your hobby your source of income. Then there's no such thing as work, and there's no such thing as getting tired. That's been my own experience. I did just what I wanted to do. It takes a little courage at first, because who the hell wants you to do just what you want to do; they've all got lots of plans for you. But you can make it happen.Collection: Wise
One of the great disadvantages of a literary or scriptural tradition like the biblical one is that a deity or context of deities becomes crystallized, petrified at a certain time and place. The deity doesn’t continue to grow, expand, or take into account new cultural forces and new realizations in the sciences, and the result is this make-believe conflict we have in our culture between science and religion.Collection: Believe
The first step to the knowledge of the wonder and mystery of life is the recognition of the monstrous nature of the earthly human realm as well as its glory, the realization that this is just how it is and that it cannot and will not be changed. Those who think they know how the universe could have been had they created it, without pain, without sorrow, without time, without death, are unfit for illumination.Collection: Inspirational
The cave you fear to enter holds the treasure you seek. Fear of the unknown is our greatest fear. Many of us would enter a tiger's lair before we would enter a dark cave. While caution is a useful instinct, we lose many opportunities and much of the adventure of life if we fail to support the curious explorer within us.Collection: Adventure
The ultimate aim of the quest must be neither release nor ecstasy for oneself, but the wisdom and the power to serve others.Collection: Quests
There are something like 18 billion cells in the brain alone. There are no two brains alike; there are no two hands alike; there are no two human beings alike. You can take your instructions and your guidance from others, but you must find your own path.Collection: Cells
Vegetarians are people who cannot hear tomatos screaming.Collection: Food
The goal of life is rapture. Art is the way we experience it.Collection: Art
In one of the Upanishads it says, when the glow of a sunset holds you and you say 'Aha,' that is the recognition of the divinity. And when you say 'Aha' to an art object, that is a recognition of divinity. And what divinity is it? It is your divinity, which is the only divinity there is. We are all phenomenal manifestations of a divine will to live, and that will and the consciousness of life is one in all of us, and that is what artwork expresses.Collection: Art
Follow your bliss. The heroic life is living the individual adventure. There is no security in following the call to adventure. Nothing is exciting if you know what the outcome is going to be.Collection: Adventure
You become mature when you become the authority of your own life.Collection: Mature
The big problem of any young person's life is to have models to suggest possibilities. Nietzsche says, 'Man is the sick animal.' Man is the animal that doesn't know what to do with itself. The mind has many possibilities, but we can live no more than one life. What are we going to do with ourselves?Collection: Animal
In the absence of an effective general mythology, each of us has his private, unrecognized, rudimentary, yet secretly potent pantheon of dreams.Collection: Dream
What you have to do, you do with play. The universe is God’s play.Collection: Play
For if anything is capable of making a poet of a literary man, it is my hometown love of the human, the living and ordinary.Collection: Men
I think that Jean Houston has broken through to a new understanding of the sense and uses of inward-turned contemplation-a n understanding that leaves the Freudian schools of technique and theory far behind. The accent is not on the curing of disease but on the enlargement, rather, of our health.Collection: School
Without passion, men are not willing to pay any price or bear any burden to set the captives free.Collection: Passion
What is a god? A god is a personification of a motivating power of a value system that functions in human life and in the universe.Collection: Inspirational
Love is exactly as strong as life.Collection: Strong
The departure from the world is regarded not as a fault, but as the first step into that noble path at the remotest turn of which illumination is to be won.Collection: Illumination
At first you might find that nothing happens there. But if you have a sacred space and use it, eventually something will happen. Your sacred space is where you find yourself again and again.Collection: Yoga
The myth is the public domain and the dream is the private myth. If your private myth, your dream, happens to coincide with that of the society, you are in good accord with your group. If it isn't, you've got a long adventure in the dark forest ahead of you.Collection: Inspirational
The modern hero-deed must be that of questing to bring to light again the lost Atlantis of the co-ordinated Soul.Collection: Hero
The actual point in question, throughout the centuries of Christian persecution, has never been faith in God, but faith in the Bible as the word of God, and in the Church (this Church or that) as the interpreter of that word.Collection: Christian
Essentially, mythologies are enormous poems that are renditions of insights, giving some sense of the marvel, the miracle and wonder of life.Collection: Life
A one sentence definition of mythology? Mythology is what we call someone else's religion.Collection: Definitions
For those in whom a local mythology still works, there is an experience both of accord with the social order, and of harmony with the universe. For those, however, in whom the authorized signs no longer work-or, if working, produce deviant effects-there follows inevitably a sense both of dissociation from the local social nexus and of quest, within and without, for life, which the brain will take to be for 'meaning'.Collection: Order
What the artist must render is a living moment somehow, a living moment actually in action or an inward experience.Collection: Inspirational
Marriage is not a simple love affair, it's an ordeal, and the ordeal is the sacrifice of ego to a relationship in which two have become one.Collection: Marriage
Marriage . . . is not a love affair; it is an ordeal. (92)Collection: Inspirational