938 Quotes by Joseph Campbell

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.

There is perhaps nothing worse than reaching the top of the ladder and discovering that you're on the wrong wall.

What will they think of me? Must be put aside for bliss.

It’s important to live life with the experience, and therefore the knowledge, of its mystery and of your own mystery. This gives life a new radiance, a new harmony, a new splendor.

Where there is a way or path, it is someone else’s. Each of us has to find his own way.

There’s always the possibility of a fiasco. But there’s also the possibility of bliss.

People often think of the Goddess as a fertility deity only. Not at all – she’s the muse. She’s the inspirer of poetry. She’s the inspirer of the spirit. So, she has three functions: one, to give us life; two, to be the one who receives us in death; and three, to inspire our spiritual, poetic realization.

All these different mythologies give us the same essential quest. You leave the world that you’re in and go into a depth or into a distance or up to a height. There you come to what was missing in your consciousness in the world you formerly inhabited. Then comes the problem either of staying with that, and letting the world drop off, or returning with that boon and trying to hold on to it as you move back into your social world again. That’s not an easy thing to do.

There’s nothing you can do that’s more important than being fulfilled. You become a sign, you become a signal, transparent to transcendence; in this way, you will find, live, and become a realization of your own personal myth.