Joseph Campbell Quotes

A priest is a functionary of a social sort. The society worships certain deities in a certain way, and the priest becomes ordained as a functionary to carry out that ritual. The deity to whom he is devoted is a deity that was there before he came along. But the shaman's powers are symbolized in his own familiars, deities of his own personal experience. His authority comes out of a psychological experience, not a social ordination.

~ Joseph Campbell

Follow your bliss and don't be afraid, and doors will open where you didn't know they were going to be.

~ Joseph Campbell

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 that you ought to be living is the one you are living.

~ Joseph Campbell

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

~ Joseph Campbell

A hero is someone who has given his or her life to something bigger than oneself.

~ Joseph Campbell

Myths are public dreams, dreams are private myths.

~ Joseph Campbell

Love is a friendship set to music.

~ Joseph Campbell

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.

~ Joseph Campbell

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

~ Joseph Campbell

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.

~ Joseph Campbell

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

~ Joseph Campbell

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

~ Joseph Campbell

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.

~ Joseph Campbell

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

~ Joseph Campbell

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

~ Joseph Campbell

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

~ Joseph Campbell

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

~ Joseph Campbell

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.

~ Joseph Campbell

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

~ Joseph Campbell

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

~ Joseph Campbell

The privilege of a lifetime is being who you are.

~ Joseph Campbell