Quotes by "Joseph Campbell"

Life has no meaning. Each of us has meaning and we bring it to life. It is a waste to be asking the question when you are the answer.

We must be willing to let go of the life we planned so as to have the life that is waiting for us.

Follow your bliss. Find where it is and don't be afraid to follow it.

Follow your bliss and the universe will open doors for you where there were only walls.

If the path before you is clear, you're probably on someone else's.

The goal of life is to make your heartbeat match the beat of the universe, to match your nature with Nature.

We're so engaged in doing things to achieve purposes of outer value that we forget the inner value, the rapture that is associated with being alive, is what it is all about.

You enter the forest at the darkest point, where there is no path. Where there is a way or path, it is someone else's path. You are not on your own path. If you follow someone else's way, you are not going to realize your potential.

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.

The demon that you can swallow gives you its power, and the greater life’s pain, the greater life’s reply.

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.

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 that what we’re seeking is an experience of being alive, so that our life experiences on the purely physical plane will have resonances with our own innermost being and reality, so that we actually feel the rapture of being alive.

Sit in a room and read--and read and read. And read the right books by the right people. Your mind is brought onto that level, and you have a nice, mild, slow-burning rapture all the time.

Your sacred space is where you can find yourself over and over again.

Myth is much more important and true than history. History is just journalism and you know how reliable that is.

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.

Where you stumble and fall, there you will find gold.

Computers are like Old Testament gods; lots of rules and no mercy.

You become mature when you become the authority of your own life.

It may be a species of impudence to think that the way you understand God is the way God is. (60).