“We must be willing to let go of the life we planned so as to have the life that is waiting for us.”
Variant: You must give up the life you planned in order to have the life that is waiting for you.
Joseph Campbell: Quotes about life
Joseph Campbell was American mythologist, writer and lecturer. Explore interesting quotes on life.
Joseph Campbell:
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Episode 2, Chapter 13-14
The Power of Myth (1988)
Context: Campbell: Eternity isn't some later time. Eternity isn't a long time. Eternity has nothing to do with time. Eternity is that dimension of here and now which thinking and time cuts out. This is it. And if you don't get it here, you won't get it anywhere. And the experience of eternity right here and now is the function of life. There's a wonderful formula that the Buddhists have for the Bodhisattva, the one whose being (sattva) is illumination (bodhi), who realizes his identity with eternity and at the same time his participation in time. And the attitude is not to withdraw from the world when you realize how horrible it is, but to realize that this horror is simply the foreground of a wonder and to come back and participate in it. "All life is sorrowful" is the first Buddhist saying, and it is. It wouldn't be life if there were not temporality involved which is sorrow. Loss, loss, loss.
Moyers: That's a pessimistic note.
Campbell: Well, you have to say yes to it, you have to say it's great this way. It's the way God intended it.
Variant: The goal of life is to make your heartbeat match the beat of the universe, to match your nature with Nature.
Source: A Joseph Campbell Companion: Reflections on the Art of Living
“You become mature when you become the authority of your own life.”
Source: A Joseph Campbell Companion: Reflections on the Art of Living
Episode 2, Chapter 4
The Power of Myth (1988)
Context: 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 what we're seeking is an experience of being alive, so that our life experiences on the purely physical plane will have resonance within our own innermost being and reality, so that we actually feel the rapture of being alive. That's what it's all finally about.
“A hero is someone who has given his or her life to something bigger than oneself”
Variant: A hero is someone who has given his or her life to something bigger than oneself.
Variant: I don’t think people are really seeking the meaning of Life. I think we’re seeking an experience of being alive…we want to feel the rapture of being alive
“All life stinks and you must embrace that with compassion.”
Source: Pathways to Bliss: Mythology and Personal Transformation
Source: The Power of Myth (book), p. 28
Context: Now, what is a myth? The dictionary definition of a myth would be stories about gods. So then you have to ask the next question: What is a god? A god is a personification of a motivating power or a value system that functions in human life and in the universe - the powers if your own body and of nature.
Source: The Hero With a Thousand Faces
“Life will always be sorrowful. We can't change it, but we can change our attitude toward it.”
Source: A Joseph Campbell Companion: Reflections on the Art of Living
“Heresy is the life of a mythology, and orthodoxy is the death.”
Lecture 1A, 20:42
Mythology and the Individual (1997)