Joseph Campbell quotes

“Follow your bliss and the universe will open doors where there were only walls.”

— Joseph Campbell

“Find a place inside where there's joy, and the joy will burn out the pain.”

— 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

“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

“God is a metaphor for that which transcends all levels of intellectual thought. It's as simple as that.”

— 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

“Opportunities to find deeper powers within ourselves come when life seems most challenging.”

— Joseph Campbell

“Your life is the fruit of your own doing. You have no one to blame but yourself.”

— 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

“Love is a friendship set to music.”

— 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

“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

“When we quit thinking primarily about ourselves and our own self-preservation, we undergo a truly heroic transformation of consciousness.”

— Joseph Campbell

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

— Joseph Campbell

“When you make the sacrifice in marriage, you're sacrificing not to each other but to unity in a relationship.”

— 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

“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

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

— 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

“A hero is someone who has given his or her life to something bigger than oneself.”

— Joseph Campbell

“The big question is whether you are going to be able to say a hearty yes to your adventure.”

— Joseph Campbell

“Myths are public dreams, dreams are private myths.”

— Joseph Campbell

“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.”

— 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

“I don't have to have faith, I have experience.”

— 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

“Is the system going to flatten you out and deny you your humanity, or are you going to be able to make use of the system to the attainment of human purposes?”

— Joseph Campbell