Quotes

“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

“When it comes down to it, I let them think what they want. If they care enough to bother with what I do, then I'm already better than them.” Marilyn Monroe

“True happiness involves the full use of one's power and talents.” John William Gardner

“Life is the art of drawing without an eraser.” John William Gardner

“The society which scorns excellence in plumbing as a humble activity and tolerates shoddiness in philosophy because it is an exalted activity will have neither good plumbing nor good philosophy: neither its pipes nor its theories will hold water.” John William Gardner

“Some people strengthen the society just by being the kind of people they are.” John William Gardner

“Much education today is monumentally ineffective. All too often we are giving young people cut flowers when we should be teaching them to grow their own plants.” John William Gardner

“The ultimate goal of the educational system is to shift to the individual the burden of pursing his own education. This will not be a widely shared pursuit until we get over our odd conviction that education is what goes on in school buildings and nowhere else. When one may pay out over two million dollars to presidential and Congressional campaigns, the U.S. government is virtually up for sale.” John William Gardner

“The creative individual has the capacity to free himself from the web of social pressures in which the rest of us are caught. He is capable of questioning the assumptions that the rest of us accept.” John William Gardner

“Political extremism involves two prime ingredients: an excessively simple diagnosis of the world's ills, and a conviction that there are identifiable villains back of it all.” John William Gardner

“We are all faced with a series of great opportunities - brilliantly disguised as insoluble problems.” John William Gardner

“For every talent that poverty has stimulated it has blighted a hundred.” John William Gardner

“Excellence is doing ordinary things extraordinarily well.” John William Gardner

“History never looks like history when you are living through it.” John William Gardner

“Whoever I am, or whatever I am doing, some kind of excellence is within my reach.” John William Gardner

“The idea for which this nation stands will not survive if the highest goal free man can set themselves is an amiable mediocrity. Excellence implies striving for the highest standards in every phase of life.” John William Gardner

“If you have some respect for people as they are, you can be more effective in helping them to become better than they are.” John William Gardner

“One of the reasons people stop learning is that they become less and less willing to risk failure.” John William Gardner

“Our problem is not to find better values but to be faithful to those we profess.” John William Gardner

“It is hard to feel individually responsible with respect to the invisible processes of a huge and distant government.” John William Gardner