Joseph Campbell

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.

People say that what we__e all seeking is a meaning for life. I don__ think that__ what we__e really seeking. I think that what we__e 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.

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.

What we're learning in our schools is not the wisdom of life. We're learning technologies, we're getting information. There's a curious reluctance on the part of faculties to indicate the life values of their subjects.

The job of an educator is to teach students to see vitality in themselves

The problem in our society and in our schools is to inclulcate, without overdoing it, the notion of education, as in the Latin educere--to lead, to bring out what is in someone rather than merely to indoctrinate him/her from the outside. (89)

The demon that you can swallow gives you its power, and the greater life__ pain, the greater life__ reply.

The privilege of a lifetime is being who you are.

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

Opportunities to find deeper powers within ourselves come when life seems most challenging.

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.

Participate joyfully in the sorrows of the world. We cannot cure the world of sorrows, but we can choose to live in joy.

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

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.

Heresy is the life of a mythology and orthodoxy is the death.

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

Mythology may, in a real sense, be defined as other people's religion. And religion may, in a sense, be understood as popular misunderstanding of mythology. (8)

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