Joseph Campbell: Trending quotes (page 5)

“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.”

“It may be a species of impudence to think that the way you understand God is the way God is. (60).”

“When you follow your bliss… doors will open where you would not have thought there would be doors, and where there wouldn't be a door for anyone else.”

“The creative act is not hanging on, but yielding to a new creative movement. Awe is what moves us forward.”

“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; where we had thought to slay another, we shall slay ourselves; where we had thought to travel outward, 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.”

“They thought that it would be a disgrace to go forth as a group. Each entered the forest at a point that he himself had chosen, where it was darkest and there was no path. If there is a path it is someone else's path and you are not on the adventure.”

“With the moon walk, the religious myth that sustained these notions could no longer be held. With our view of earthrise, we could see that the earth and the heavens were no longer divided but that the earth is in the heavens. (105)”

“The problem in our society and in our schools is to inclulcate, without overdoing it, the notion of education, as in the Latin educere--to lead, to bring out what is in someone rather than merely to indoctrinate him/her from the outside. (89)”

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

“The latest incarnation of Oedipus, the continued romance of Beauty and the Beast, stand this afternoon on the corner of 42nd Street and Fifth Avenue, waiting for the traffic light to change.”

“Follow your inner heart and the world moves in and helps.”

“We need myths that will identify the individual not with his local group but with the planet.”

“Wars and temper tantrums are the makeshifts of ignorance; regrets are illuminations come too late.”

“Mythology may, in a real sense, be defined as other people's religion. And religion may, in a sense, be understood as popular misunderstanding of mythology. (8)”

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

“What we're learning in our schools is not the wisdom of life. We're learning technologies, we're getting information. There's a curious reluctance on the part of faculties to indicate the life values of their subjects.”

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

“He must put aside his pride, his virtue, beauty and life and bow or submit to the absolutely intolerable.”

“He who thinks he knows, doesn't know. He who knows that he doesn't know, knows.”