Some Quotes by Joseph Campbell
GEN (January 2011)
Follow Your Bliss…
Go to Google and enter - "joseph campbell" quote
His friend Hendrick Zimmer said:
- The best things can’t be told because they transcend thought.
- The second best are misunderstood because those are the thoughts that are suppose to refer to that which can’t be thought about and one gets stuck with the thoughts.
- The third best are what we talk about…
Computers are like Old Testament gods; lots of rules and no mercy.
If you follow your bliss, you put yourself on a kind of track, which has been there all the while waiting for you, and the life that you ought to be living is the one you are living.
A hero is someone who has given his or her life to something bigger than oneself.
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.
God is a metaphor for that which transcends all levels of intellectual thought. It's as simple as that.
I don't believe people are looking for the meaning of life as much as they are looking for the experience of being alive.
If you follow your bliss, doors will open for you that wouldn't have opened for anyone else.
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.
Myths are public dreams, dreams are private myths.If your private myth, your dream, happens to coincide with that of the society, you are in good accord with your group. If it isn't, you've got an adventure in the dark forest ahead of you.
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.
The big question is whether you are going to be able to say a hearty yes to your adventure.
We must be willing to get rid of the life we've planned, so as to have the life that is waiting for us.
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 you make the sacrifice in marriage, you're sacrificing not to each other but to unity in a relationship.
The conquest of the fear of death is the recovery of life's joy. One can experience an unconditional affirmation of life only when one has accepted death, not as contrary to life, but as an aspect of life. Life in its becoming is always shedding death, and on the point of death. The conquest of fear yields the courage of life. That is the cardinal initiation of every heroic adventure - fearlessness and achievement.
You must have a room, or a certain hour or so a day, where you don't know what was in the newspapers that morning... a place where you can simply experience and bring forth what you are and what you might be.
Both the artist and the lover know that perfection is not loveable. It is the clumsiness of a fault that makes a person lovable.
The privilege of a lifetime is being who you are.
Furthermore, we have not even to risk the journey 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; where we had thought to be alone, we shall be with all the world.
The cave you fear to enter holds the treasure you seek.
Follow your bliss. 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 you ought to be living is the one you are living.
The goal of life is to make your heartbeat match the beat of the universe, to match your nature with Nature.
If the path before you is clear, you're probably on someone else's.
A real artist is the one who has learned to recognize and to render... the 'radiance' of all things as an epiphany or showing forth of the truth.
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.
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.
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.
Campbell phrase that has been most widely circulated in the years since his death is "Follow your bliss."
"Both his critics and some of his fans have misunderstood the phrase," said Mr. Young. "It isn't, 'Go have a good time.' It's, 'Pay attention to the still, small voice -- to that unique calling that seems to know your name.'
"It is the seeker's life. It can be a life of incredible hardship and sacrifice. But there is a kind of joy in being in sync with your nature, with a sense of purpose."
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