Quote

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.

Joseph Campbell

Change background

T
T
T

Change font

TAGS & TOPICS

Joseph Campbell
Age: 83 †
Born: 1904
Born: March 26
Died: 1987
Died: October 30
Academic
Anthropologist
Essayist
Ethnologist
Historian
Historian Of Religion
Lecturer
Mythologist
Orator
Researcher
Short Story Writer
White Plains
New York
Joseph John Campbell
Joseph Cambell
Without
Ascribe
Life
Encouraging
Cancer
Meaning
Bring
Alive
Whatever
Inspirational

More quotes by Joseph Campbell

Image
Freud tells us to blame our parents for all the shortcomings of our life, Marx tells us to blame the upper class of our society. But the only one to blame is oneself.
Joseph Campbell
Image
For we have not even to risk the adventure alone, for the heros of all time have gone before us.
Joseph Campbell
Image
God is an intelligible sphere-a sphere known to mind, not to the senses-whose center is everywhere and whose circumference nowhere.
Joseph Campbell
Image
Just as anyone who listens to the muse will hear, you can write out of your own intention or out of inspiration. There is such a thing. It comes up and talks. And those who have heard deeply the rhythms and hymns of the gods, can recite those hymns in such a way that the gods will be attracted.
Joseph Campbell
Image
Participate joyfully in the sorrows of the world. We cannot cure the world of sorrows, but we can choose to live in joy.
Joseph Campbell
Image
The adventure of the hero is the adventure of being alive
Joseph Campbell
Image
What we are really living for is the experience of life, both the pain and the pleasure.
Joseph Campbell
Image
There are now no more horizons. And with the dissolution of horizons we have experienced and are experiencing collisions, terrific collisions, not only of peoples but also of their mythologies. It is as when dividing panels are withdrawn from between chambers of very hot and very cold airs: there is a rush of these forces together.
Joseph Campbell
Image
Myths are the world's dreams. They are archetypal dreams and deal with great human problems. Myths and dreams come from the same place. They come from realizations of some kind that then have to find expression in symbolic form.
Joseph Campbell
Image
The myth is the public domain and the dream is the private myth. If your private myth, your dream, happens to coincide with that of the society, you are in good accord with your group. If it isn't, you've got a long adventure in the dark forest ahead of you.
Joseph Campbell
Image
I think what we lack isn't science, but poetry that reveals what the heart is ready to recognize
Joseph Campbell
Image
The theme of the Grail is the bringing of life into what is known as 'the wasteland.' The wasteland is the preliminary theme to which the Grail is the answer. . . It's the world of people living inauthentic lives - doing what they are supposed to do.
Joseph Campbell
Image
The actual point in question, throughout the centuries of Christian persecution, has never been faith in God, but faith in the Bible as the word of God, and in the Church (this Church or that) as the interpreter of that word.
Joseph Campbell
Image
The cave you fear to enter holds the treasure you seek. Fear of the unknown is our greatest fear. Many of us would enter a tiger's lair before we would enter a dark cave. While caution is a useful instinct, we lose many opportunities and much of the adventure of life if we fail to support the curious explorer within us.
Joseph Campbell
Image
Life is but a mask worn on the face of death. And is death, then, but another mask? 'How many can say,' asks the Aztec poet, 'that there is, or is not, a truth beyond?'
Joseph Campbell
Image
The familiar life horizon has been outgrown: the old concepts, ideals, and emotional patterns no longer fit the time for the passing of a threshold is at hand.
Joseph Campbell
Image
Mythology is the womb of mankind's initiation to life and death.
Joseph Campbell
Image
The goal is to live with God like composure on the full rush of energy, like Dionysus riding the leopard, without being torn to pieces.
Joseph Campbell
Image
I don’t think there is any such thing as an ordinary mortal. Everybody has his own possibility of rapture in the experience of life. All he has to do is recognize it and then cultivate it and get going with it. I always feel uncomfortable when people speak about ordinary mortals because I’ve never met an ordinary man, woman, or child.
Joseph Campbell
Image
The priests used to say that faith can move mountains, and nobody believed them. Today the scientists say that they can level mountains, and nobody doubts them.
Joseph Campbell