Quotes About Life

Love is the burning point of life, and since all life is sorrowful, so is love. The stronger the love, the more the pain. Love itself is pain, you might say -the pain of being truly alive.

Tragedy is the shattering of the forms and of our attachment to the forms; comedy, the wild and careless, inexhaustible joy of life invincible.

T]here is nothing to say about life. It has no meaning. You make meaning. If you want a meaning in your life, find a meaning and bring it into your life, but life won't give you a meaning. Meaning is a concept. It is a notion of an end toward which you are going. The point of Buddhism is This Is It.

They are equals, but not the same, because when you lose the tension of polarities you lose the tension of life.

The mystery of life is beyond all human conception. Everything we know is within the terminology of the concepts of being and not being, many and single, true and untrue. We always think in terms of opposites. But God, the ultimate, is beyond the pairs of opposites, that is all there is to it.

There's no meaning. What's the meaning of the universe? What's the meaning of a flea? It's just there. 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's all about.

CAMPBELL: I think of mythology as the homeland of the muses, the inspirers of art, the inspirers of poetry. To see life as a poem and yourself participating in a poem is what the myth does for you.

But the mistery of the woman is no less a mystery than death. Childbirth is no less a mystery; nor the flow of the mother's milk; nor the menstrual cycle -in its accord with the moon. The creative magic of the female body is a thing of wonder in itself.

Only birth can conquer death — the birth, not of the old thing again, but of something new.

In the Old Testament story God points out the one forbidden thing. Now, God must have known very well that man was going to eat the forbidden fruit. But it was by doing that that man became the initiator of his own life. Life really began with that act of disobedience.

You changed the definition of a myth from the search for meaning to the experience of meaning. CAMPBELL: Experience of life.

People have the notion of saving the world by shifting things around, changing the rules, and who's on top, and so forth. No, no! Any world is a valid world if it's alive. The thing to do is to bring life to it, and the only way to do that is to find in your own case where the life is and become alive yourself.

Myth helps you to put your mind in touch with this experience of being alive.

The crux of the curious difficulty lies in the fact that our conscious views of what life ought to be seldom correspond to what life really is.

All of life is a meditation, most of it unintentional.

Giving birth is definitely a heroic deed, in that it is the giving over of oneself to the life of another.

The adventure of the hero represents the moment in his life when he achieved illumination - the nuclear moment when, while still alive, he found and opened the road to the light beyond the dark walls of our living death

Nevertheless, every failure to cope with a life situation must be laid, in the end, to a restriction of consciousness. Wars and temper tantrums are the makeshifts of ignorance; regrets are illuminations come too late.

Tragedy is the shattering of the forms and our attachment to the forms; comedy, the wild and careless, inexhaustible joy of life invincible.

Mythologies are in fact the public dreams that move and shape societies, and conversely one's own dreams are the little myths of the private gods, antigods, and guardian powers that are moving and shaping oneself: revelations of the actual fears, desires, aims, and values by which one's life is subliminally ordered.

Full circle, from the tomb of the womb to the womb of the tomb, we come:

Now, one of the main problems of mythology is reconciling the mind to this brutal precondition of all life, which lives by the killing and eating of lives. You don't kid yourself by eating only vegetables, either, for they, too, are alive. So the essence of life is this eating of itself! Life lives on lives, and the reconciliation of the human mind and sensibilities to that fundamental fact

an ameliorative mythology [that through] prayer or good deeds or some other activity, one can change the basic principles, the fundamental preconditions of life... This is like marrying someone in order to improve him or her—it is not a marriage.

And more important, all the life-potentialities that we never managed to bring to adult realization, those other portions of ourself, are there; for such golden seeds do not die. If only a portion of that lost totality could be dredged up into the light of day, we should experience a marvelous expansion of our powers, a vivid renewal of life.