Joseph Campbell Quotes

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

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.

I don't believe people are looking for the meaning of life as much as they are looking for the experience of being alive.

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

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

The privilege of a lifetime is being who you are.

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

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.

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.

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.

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

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

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

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

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.

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?

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

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.

Love is a friendship set to music.

Myths are public dreams, dreams are private myths.

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.

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

Participate joyfully in the sorrows of the world. We cannot cure the world of sorrows, but we can choose to live in joy.

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

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