938 Quotes by Joseph Campbell

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.

It is remarkable how completely forgotten episodes, when touched with a word, open to the memory – at first vaguely, like the recollection of a dream, but then with increasing clarity and certitude, until at last all is again present, and one wonders how such scenes could have ever been forgotten.

If you can see your path laid out in front of you step by step, you know it’s not your path. Your own path you make with every step you take. That’s why it’s your path.

The big problem of any young person’s life is to have models to suggest possibilities. Nietzsche says, ‘Man is the sick animal.’ Man is the animal that doesn’t know what to do with itself. The mind has many possibilities, but we can live no more than one life. What are we going to do with ourselves?

The seizure of passionate love can be, in such a context, only illicit, breaking in upon the order of one’s dutiful life in virtue as a devastating storm.

The best way to help mankind is through the perfection of yourself.

What I think is that a good life is one hero journey after another. Over and over again, you are called to the realm of adventure, you are called to new horizons. Each time, there is the same problem: do I dare? And then if you do dare, the dangers are there, and the help also, in the fulfillment or the fiasco.

You can’t have creativity unless you leave behind the bounded, the fixed, all the rules.

I always tell my students follow your bliss. When you have that feeling then stay with it and don’t let anyone throw you off.