Quotes from Joseph Campbell

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 that what we're seeking is an experience of being alive, so that our life experiences on the purely physical plane will have resonances within our own innermost being and reality, so that we actually feel the rapture of being alive.

When the story is in your mind, then you see its relevance to something happening in your own life. It gives you perspective on what's happening to you. With the loss of that, we've really lost something because we don't have a comparable literature to take its place.

it is my hometown love of the human, the living and ordinary. All warmth derives from this love, all kindness and all humor.

Myths are stories of our search through the ages for truth, for meaning, for significance. We all need to tell our story and to understand our story. We all need to understand death and to cope with death, and we all need help in our passages from birth to life and then to death. We need for life to signify, to touch the eternal, to understand the mysterious, to find out who we are.

The only myth that is going to be worth thinking about in the immediate future is one that is talking about the planet, not the city, not these people, but the planet, and everybody on it.

Myths are clues to the spiritual potentialities of the human life.

Myth helps you to put your mind in touch with this experience of being alive. It tells you what the experience is.

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

Todos los dioses, todos los cielos, todos los infiernos, están en ti.

That's the same idea that comes to us through the German Romantics, as well as out of India. To Goethe's "Alles Vergängliche ist nur ein Gleichnis" ("Everything transitory is but a reference"),5 Nietzsche adds another point: "Alles Unvergängliche—das ist nur ein Gleichnis" ("All things eternal are only references as well").

Martin Nilsson, one of the great authorities on Greek religious antiquity, writes that Artemis was the total Great Goddess and represented all the powers of nature. With the differentiation of the goddesses and the departmentalizing of powers, Artemis came to be associated with the nature world and the forest; she became the Mother of the Wild Things.

Chief Seattle: "The Earth does not belong to Man; Man belongs to the Earth."6

There is a sense of respect for the other side: champions are matched as equals, and this is particularly Greek. This is characteristic of these epics and tragedies. Aeschylus wrote his tragedy The Persians only a few years after he himself had been in battle against the Persians, and the humanity with which he treats his former enemy is something typically Greek.

You must understand that each religion is a kind of software that has its own set of signals and will work.

The hero, therefore, is the man or woman who has been able to battle past his personal and local historical limitations.

The mind of man, cleansed of secondary and merely temporal concerns, beholds with the radiance of a cleansed mirror a reflection of the rational mind of God.

Man was not breathed into the earth. Man came out of the earth.

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.

Suddenly you're ripped into being alive. And life is pain, and life is suffering, and life is horror, but my god you're alive and its spectacular.

The big question is whether you are going to be able to say a hearty yes to your adventure.

Life is a guy trying to play a violin solo in public, while learning the music and his instrument at the same time.

Our life evokes our character. You find out more about yourself as you go on. That's why it's good to put yourself in situations that will evoke your higher nature rather than your lower.

All babies are Buddha babies.

An old Apache storyteller reminds us