Joseph Campbell Quotes Page 2

“Preachers err by trying to talk people into belief; better they reveal the radiance of their own discovery.”

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

“The cave you fear to enter holds the treasure you seek.”

“The experience of eternity right here and now is the function of life. Heaven is not the place to have the experience; here is the place to have the experience.”

“The fates lead him who will; him who won't they drag.”

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

“The Hero Path:

We have not even to risk the adventure alone for the heroes of all time have gone before us. The labyrinth is thoroughly known – we have only to follow the thread of the hero path.

And where we had thought to find an abomination we shall find a God. And where we had thought to slay another we shall slay ourselves.

Where we had thought to travel outwards we shall come to the center of our own existence. And where we had thought to be alone we shall be with all the world.”

“The hero’s journey always begins with the call. One way or another, a guide must come to say:

"Look, you’re in Sleepy Land. Wake. Come on a trip. There is a whole aspect of your consciousness, your being, that’s not been touched. So you’re at home here? Well, there’s not enough of you there."

And so it starts.”

“The privilege of a lifetime is being who you are.”

“There is perhaps nothing worse than reaching the top of the ladder and discovering you’re on the wrong wall.”

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

“We're not on our journey to save the world but to save ourselves. But in doing that you save the world. The influence of a vital person vitalizes.”

“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 find a writer who really is saying something to you, read everything that writer has written and you will get more education and depth of understanding out of that than reading a scrap here and a scrap there and elsewhere.

Then go to people who influenced that writer, or those who were related to him, and your world builds together in an organic way that is really marvelous.”

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

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

“Whether you call someone a hero or a monster is all relative to where the focus of your consciousness may be.”

“You are the hero of your own story.”

“You become mature when you become the authority of your own life.”

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

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

“Life is like arriving late for a movie, having to figure out what was going on without bothering everybody with a lot of questions, and then being unexpectedly called away before you find out how it ends.”

“Regrets are illuminations come too late.”

“As you go the way of life, you will see a great chasm. Jump! It is not as wide as you think.

You enter the forest at the darkest point, where there is no path. Where there is a way or path, it is someone else’s path. You are not on your own path.

If you follow someone else’s way, you are not going to realize your potential.”

“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.”

“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.”

“Half the people in the world think that the metaphors of their religious traditions, for example, are facts. And the other half contends that they are not facts at all.

As a result we have people who consider themselves believers because they accept metaphors as facts, and we have others who classify themselves as atheists because they think religious metaphors are lies.”