Quotes by Joseph Campbell

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

You enter the forestat the darkest point,where there is no path.Where there is a way or path,it is someone elses path.You are not on your own path.If you follow someone elses way,you are not going to realizeyour 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.

Were 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.

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 dont be afraid, and doors will open where you didnt 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.

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

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).

Is the god the source, or is the god a human manner of conceiving of the force and energy that supports the world? In our tradition God is a male. This male and female differentiation is made, however, within the field of time and space, the field of duality. If God is beyond duality, you cannot say that God is a He. You cannot say God is a She. You cannot say God is an It. (18)

The Garden is a metaphor for the following: our minds, and our thinking in terms of pairs of opposites--man and woman, good and evil--are as holy as that of a god. (50)

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

When you are on your path, and it is truly your path, doors will open for you where there were no doors for someone else.

When you realize that eternity is right here now, that it is within your possibility to experience the eternity of your own truth and being, then you grasp the following: That which you are was never born and will never die. . . . (90)

Modern romance, like Greek tragedy, celebrates the mystery of dismemberment, which is life in time. The happy ending is justly scorned as a misrepresentation; for the world, as we know it, as we have seen it, yields but one ending: death, disintegration, dismemberment, and the crucifixion of our heart with the passing of the forms that we have loved.

How does the ordinary person come to the transcendent? For a start, I would say, study poetry. Learn how to read a poem. You need not have the experience to get the message, or at least some indication of the message. It may come gradually. (92)