Quotes from Joseph Campbell

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

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

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

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.

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.

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

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

Love is a friendship set to music.

I don't have to have faith, I have experience.

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.

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.

What each must seek in his own life never was on land or sea. It is something that never has been and never could have been experienced by anyone else.

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.

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

Life has no meaning. Each of us has meaning and we bring it to life. It is a waste to be asking the question when you are the answer.

We must be willing to let go of the life we planned so as to have the life that is waiting for us.

The cave you fear to enter holds the treasure you seek.

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

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 with our own innermost being and reality, so that we actually feel the rapture of being alive.

Follow your bliss and the universe will open doors for you where there were only walls.

The privilege of a lifetime is being who you are.

If you can see your path laid out in front of you step by step, you know it's not your path. Your own path you make with every step you take. That's why it's your path.

Sit in a room and read--and read and read. And read the right books by the right people. Your mind is brought onto that level, and you have a nice, mild, slow-burning rapture all the time.

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