If you want to understand what's most important to a society, don't examine its art or literature, simply look at its biggest buildings. - Joseph Campbell
Mythology is composed by poets out of their insights and realizations. Mythologies are not invented; they are found. You can no more tell us what your dream is going to be tonight than we can invent a myth. Myths come from the mystical region of essential experience. - Joseph Campbell
When you follow your bliss... doors will open where you would not have thought there would be doors; and where there wouldn't be a door for anyone else. - Joseph Campbell
The experience of eternity right here and now is the function of life. Heaven is not the place to have the experience; here is the place to have the experience. - Joseph Campbell
The cave you fear to enter holds the treasure you seek. - Joseph Campbell
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. - Joseph Campbell
Myth must be kept alive. The people who can keep it alive are the artists of one kind or another. - Joseph Campbell
Every religion is true one way or another. It is true when understood metaphorically. But when it gets stuck in its own metaphors, interpreting them as facts, then you are in trouble. - Joseph Campbell
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. - Joseph Campbell
Your sacred space is where you can find yourself over and over again. - Joseph Campbell
If you want to change the world, change the metaphor. - Joseph Campbell
Where you stumble and fall, there you will find gold. - Joseph Campbell
We must be willing to let go of the life we planned so as to have the life that is waiting for us. - Joseph Campbell
Myth is much more important and true than history. History is just journalism and you know how reliable that is. - Joseph Campbell
A bit of adviceGiven to a young Native AmericanAt the time of his initiation:As you go the way of life,You will see a great chasm. Jump.It is not as wide as you think. - Joseph Campbell
We must be willing to get rid of the life we've planned, so as to have the life that is waiting for us. - Joseph Campbell
Every act has both good and evil results. Every act in life yields pairs of opposites in its results. The best we can do is lean toward the light, toward the harmonious relationships that come from compassion with suffering, from understanding the other person. - Joseph Campbell
The fates lead him who will; him who won't they drag. - Joseph Campbell
How to get rid of ego as dictator and turn it into messenger and servant and scout, to be in your service, is the trick. - Joseph Campbell
Follow your bliss and the universe will open doors for you where there were only walls. - Joseph Campbell
If the path before you is clear, you're probably on someone else's. - Joseph Campbell
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. - Joseph Campbell
You must give up the life you planned in order to have the life that is waiting for you. - Joseph Campbell
A myth is something that has never happened, but is happening all the time. - Joseph Campbell
Myth is what we call other people's religion. - Joseph Campbell
With passion you want to possess. The conversion of passion into compassion is the whole problem of marriage. - Joseph Campbell
in America we have people from all kinds of backgrounds, all in a cluster, together, and consequently law has become very important in this country. Lawyers and law are what hold us together. There is no ethos. - Joseph Campbell
All religions are true but none are literal. - Joseph Campbell
Myths are public dreams, dreams are private myths.We must be willing to get rid of the life we planned, so as to have the life that is waiting for us.I have bought this wonderful machine — a computer ... it seems to me to be an Old Testament god, with a lot of rules and no mercy. - Joseph Campbell
The job of an educator is to teach students to see vitality in themselves - Joseph Campbell
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. - Joseph Campbell
You have to learn to recognize your own depths. - Joseph Campbell
You don't ask what a dance means. You enjoy it. You don't ask what the world means. You enjoy it. You don't ask what you mean. You enjoy it. - Joseph Campbell
The images of Myth are reflections of Spiritual and Depth potentialities of every one of us. Through contemplating those we evoke those powers in our own lives to operate through ourselves. - Joseph Campbell