Quotes from Joseph Campbell

It takes courage to do what you want. Other people have a lot of plans for you... Follow your bliss.

I always tell my students, go where your body and soul want to go. When you have the feeling, then stay with it, and don't let anyone throw you off.

I don't think people are really seeking the meaning of Life. I think we're seeking an experience of being alive…we want to feel the rapture of being alive

Follow your bliss. Find where it is and don't be afraid to follow it.

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

The ultimate aim of the quest must be neither release nor ecstasy for oneself, but the wisdom and the power to serve others.

Wisdom and foolishness are practically the same. Both are indifferent to the opinions of the world

We have today to learn to get back into accord with the wisdom of nature and realize again our brotherhood with the animals and with the water and the sea.

If marriage isn't a first priority in your life, you're not married.

Marriage . . . is not a love affair; it is an ordeal. (92)

Breaking out is following your bliss pattern, quitting the old place, starting your hero journey, following your bliss. You throw off yesterday as the snake sheds its skin.

Man actually needs the striving and struggling for some goal worthy of him.

For if anything is capable of making a poet of a literary man, it is my hometown love of the human, the living and ordinary.

Without passion, men are not willing to pay any price or bear any burden to set the captives free.

I always feel uncomfortable when people speak about ordinary mortals because I've never met an ordinary man, woman or child.

Getting a comedic view of your situation gives you spiritual distance. Having a sense of humor saves you.

Life is without meaning. You bring the meaning to it... Being alive is the meaning.

What we are really living for is the experience of life, both the pain and the pleasure. The world is a match for us. We are a match for the world.

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.

Art is the set of wings to carry you out of your own entanglement.

The creative act is not hanging on, but yielding to a new creative movement. Awe is what moves us forward.

As a white candle / In a holy place, / So is the beauty / Of an aged face

When before the beauty of a sunset or a mountain, you pause and exclaim, 'Ah,' you are participating in divinity.

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.