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Quotes by Joseph Campbell


If the path before you is clear, you're probably on someone else's.
– Joseph Campbell
A hero is someone who has given his or her life to something bigger than oneself.
– Joseph Campbell
Every religion is true one way or another. It is true when understood metaphorically. But when it gets stuck in its own metaphors, interpreting them as facts, then you are in trouble.
– Joseph Campbell
I don't believe people are looking for the meaning of life as much as they are looking for the experience of being alive.
– Joseph Campbell
I don't have to have faith, I have experience.
– Joseph Campbell
Life is without meaning. You bring the meaning to it. The meaning of life is whatever you ascribe it to be. Being alive is the meaning.
– Joseph Campbell
Myths are public dreams, dreams are private myths.
– Joseph Campbell
One way or another, we all have to find what best fosters the flowering of our humanity in this contemporary life, and dedicate ourselves to that.
– Joseph Campbell
The big question is whether you are going to be able to say a hearty yes to your adventure.
– Joseph Campbell
What each must seek in his life never was on land or sea. It is something out of his own unique potentiality for experience, something that never has been and never could have been experienced by anyone else.
– Joseph Campbell
When people get married because they think it's a long-time love affair, they'll be divorced very soon, because all love affairs end in disappointment. But marriage is a recognition of a spiritual identity.
– Joseph Campbell
When you follow your bliss... doors will open where you would not have thought there would be doors, and where there wouldn't be a door for anyone else.
– Joseph Campbell
When you make the sacrifice in marriage, you're sacrificing not to each other but to unity in a relationship.
– Joseph Campbell
Furthermore, we have not even to risk the journey 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; where we had thought to be alone, we shall be with all the world.
– 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.
– Joseph Campbell
Your life is the fruit of your own doing. You have no one to blame but yourself.
– Joseph Campbell
We must let go of the life we have planned, so as to accept the one that is waiting for us.
– Joseph Campbell
The privilege of a lifetime is being who you are.
– Joseph Campbell
The goal of life is to make your heartbeat match the beat of the universe, to match your nature with Nature.
– Joseph Campbell
Participate joyfully in the sorrows of the world. We cannot cure the world of sorrows, but we can choose to live in joy.
– Joseph Campbell
Opportunities to find deeper powers within ourselves come when life seems most challenging.
– Joseph Campbell
Love is a friendship set to music.
– Joseph Campbell
It is by going down into the abyss that we recover the treasures of life. Where you stumble, there lies your treasure.
– Joseph Campbell
I think the person who takes a job in order to live - that is to say, for the money - has turned himself into a slave.
– Joseph Campbell
God is a metaphor for that which transcends all levels of intellectual thought. It's as simple as that.
– Joseph Campbell
Find a place inside where there's joy, and the joy will burn out the pain.
– Joseph Campbell
Computers are like Old Testament gods lots of rules and no mercy.
– Joseph Campbell