Joseph Campbell Quotes

Where you stumble, there lies your treasure. The very cave you are afraid to enter turns out to be the source of what you are looking for. The damned thing in the cave that was so dreaded has become the center.

All life stinks and you must embrace that with compassion.

you ever think that it is this absence of the religious experience of ecstasy, of joy, this denial of transcendence in our society, that has turned so many young people to the use of drugs?

We are having experiences all the time which may on occasion render some sense of this, a little intuition of where your bliss is. Grab it. No one can tell you what it is going to be. You have to learn to recongnize your own depth.

The mystical marriage with the queen goddess of the world represents the hero's total mastery of life ; for the woman is life, the hero its knower and master. And the testings of the hero, which were preliminary to his ultimate experience and deed, were symbolical of those crises of realization by means of which his consciousness came to be amplified and made capable of enduring the full posession of the mother-destroyer, his inevitable bride. With that he knows that he and the father are one: he is in the father's place.
Thus phrased, in the extremest of terms, the problem may sound remote from the affairs of normal humans. Nevertheless, every failure to cope with life situations must be laid to a restriction of consciousness. Wars and temper tantrums are the makeshifts of ignorance; regrets are illuminations come too late. The whole sense of the ubiquitous myth of the hero's passage is that it shall serve as a general patter for men and women, wherever they may stand along the scale. therefore, it is formulated in the broadest terms. the individual has only to discover his own position with reference to this general human formula, and let it then assist him past his restricting walls. who and where are his ogres? those are the reflcetions of the unsolved enigmas of his own humanity. what are his ideals? those are the symptoms of his grasp of life.

The myth is not my own; I have it from my mother.

God is within you! You yourself are the creator. If you find that place within you from which you brought this thing about, you will be able to live with it and affirm it, perhaps even enjoy it, as your life.

The happy ending of the fairy tale, the myth, and the divine comedy of the soul, is to be read, not as a contradiction, but as a transcendence of the universal tragedy of man.

"Marriage is not a love affair. A love affair is a totally different thing. A marriage is a commitment to that which you are. That person is literally your other half. And you and the other are one. A love affair isn't that. That is a relationship for pleasure, and when it gets to be unpleasurable, it's off. But a marriage is a life commitment, and a life commitment means the prime concern of your life. If marriage is not the prime concern, you're not married....The Puritans called marriage "the little church within the Church." In marriage, every day you love, and every day you forgive. It is an ongoing sacrament – love and forgiveness.... Like the yin/yang symbol....Here I am, and here she is, and here we are. Now when I have to make a sacrifice, I'm not sacrificing to her, I'm sacrificing to the relationship. Resentment against the other one is wrongly placed. Life in in the relationship, that's where your life now is. That's what a marriage is – whereas, in a love affair, you have two lives in a more or less successful relationship to each other for a certain length of time, as long as it seems agreeable."

Participate joyfully in the sorrows of the world. We cannot cure the world of sorrows, but we can choose to live in joy. The warrior's approach is to say “yes” to life: “yea” to it all.

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

Artemis, along with Selene and Hekate, was one of the Greek triads representing the Old European three-bodied or triune aspect of the Goddess. We can see this represented in this figurine (Fig. 72) of Artemis as part of three-fold Hekate. First you have the pillar — the goddess mother is the axis of the universe herself. Round about are three representations of the Goddess, including Artemis, and Hekate, who represents the chthonic underworld — the magic aspect of the Goddess — and then dancing in a relaxed, fluent manner around about we see the three Graces. Artemis is the giver of abundance: Our Lady of the Wild Things, and the All-Mother of the many breasts, who bears the totality of the entities of the natural world. This is something very, very different from the image of the virgin goddess and the mere huntress that we have normally associated with her.

The contemplation of the life thus should be undertaken as a meditation on one’s own immanent divinity, not as a prelude to precise imitation, the lesson being, not “Do thus and be good,” but “Know this and be God.

Awe is what moves us forward.

He must put aside his pride, his virtue, beauty and life and bow or submit to the absolutely intolerable.