Quotes by Joseph Campbell

Awe is what moves us forward.

In marriage you are not sacrificing yourself to the other person. You are sacrificing yourself to the relationship.You become mature when you become the authority of your own life.Life will always be sorrowful. We cant change it, but we can change our attitude toward it.Awe is what moves us forward.

The psychotic drowns in the same waters in which the mystic swims with delight.

The LSD phenomenon, on the other hand, is—to me at least—more interesting. It is an intentionally achieved schizophrenia, with the expectation of a spontaneous remission—which, however, does not always follow. Yoga, too, is intentional schizophrenia: one breaks away from the world, plunging inward, and the ranges of vision experienced are in fact the same as those of a psychosis. But what, then, is the difference? What is the difference between a psychotic or LSD experience and a yogic, or a mystical? The plunges are all into the same deep inward sea; of that there can be no doubt. The symbolic figures encountered are in many instances identical (and I shall have something more to say about those in a moment). But there is an important difference. The difference—to put it sharply—is equivalent simply to that between a diver who can swim and one who cannot. The mystic, endowed with native talents for this sort of thing and following, stage by stage, the instruction of a master, enters the waters and finds he can swim; whereas the schizophrenic, unprepared, unguided, and ungifted, has fallen or has intentionally plunged, and is drowning.

For the bliss of the deep abode is not lightly abandoned in favor of the self-scattering of the wakened state,

Only birth can conquer death—the birth , not of the old thing again, but of something new .

A priest is a functionary of a social sort. The society worships certain deities in a certain way, and the priest becomes ordained as a functionary to carry out that ritual. The deity to whom he is devoted is a deity that was there before he came along. But the shamans powers are symbolized in his own familiars, deities of his own personal experience. His authority comes out of a psychological experience, not a social ordination.

Follow your bliss and dont be afraid, and doors will open where you didnt know they were going to be.

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. Find where it is and dont be afraid to follow it.

We must let go of the life we have planned, so as to accept the one that is waiting for us.

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

Myths are public dreams, dreams are private myths.

Love is a friendship set to music.

When people get married because they think its a long-time love affair, theyll be divorced very soon, because all love affairs end in disappointment. But marriage is a recognition of a spiritual identity.

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

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

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.

It is by going down into the abyss that we recover the treasures of life. Where you stumble, there lies your treasure.

God is a metaphor for that which transcends all levels of intellectual thought. Its as simple as that.