WednesdayMar 25, 2026
Quotes: 53419 Authors: 9969
Joseph John Campbell (March 26, 1904 - October 30, 1987) was an American mythology professor, writer, and orator best known for his work in the fields of comparative mythology and comparative religion.
Myths are public dreams, dreams are private myths.
The myth is the public dream and the dream is the private myth. 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.
Our demons are our own limitations, which shut us off from the realization of the ubiquity of the spirit ... each of these demons is conquered in a vision quest.
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 resonance's within our own innermost being and reality, so that we actually feel the rapture of being alive.
I don't have to have faith. I have experience.
I think the person who takes a job in order to live that is to say, (just) for the money has turned himself into a slave.
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.
The theme of the Grail is the bringing of life into what is known as 'the wasteland.' The wasteland is the preliminary theme to which the Grail is the answer... It's the world of people living inauthentic lives doing what they are supposed to do.
God is the experience of looking at a tree and saying, 'Ah!'
If you realize what the real problem islosing yourselfyou realize that this itself is the ultimate trial.
If marriage isn't a first priority in your life, you're not married.
Essentially, mythologies are enormous poems that are renditions of insights, giving some sense of the marvel, the miracle and wonder of life.
Mythology is the womb of man's initiation to life and death.
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.
When we quit thinking primarily about ourselves and our own self-preservation, we undergo a truly heroic transformation of consciousness.
The role of the artist I now understood as that of revealing through the world-surfaces the implicit forms of the soul, and the great agent to assist the artist was the myth.
The big question is whether you are going to be able to say a hearty yes to your adventure.
Myths are clues to the spiritual potentialities of the human life.
When you are required to exhibit strength, it comes.
We are kept out of the Garden by our own fear and desire in relation to what we think to be the goods of our life.
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.
Follow your bliss.
Computers are like Old Testament gods; lots of rules and no mercy.
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.
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.
Eternity has nothing to do with the hereafter... This is it... If you don't get it here, you won't get it anywhere. The experience of eternity right here and now is the function of life. Heaven is not the place to have the experience; here's the place to have the experience.
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.
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.
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