Inspirational Quotes
Find one of the best and famous quote catagorized into topics like inspirational, motivations, deep, thoughtful, art, success, passion, frindship, life, love and many more.
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.
Quote by -Joseph Campbell
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 is all about.
Quote by -Joseph Campbell
Certainly Star Wars has a valid mythological perspective. It shows the state as a machine and asks, "Is the machine going to crush humanity or serve humanity?" Humanity comes not from the machine but from the heart. What I see in Star Wars is the same problem that Faust gives us:
Quote by -Joseph Campbell
It may be a species of impudence to think that the way you understand God is the way God is. (60).
Quote by -Joseph Campbell
With the moon walk, the religious myth that sustained these notions could no longer be held. With our view of earthrise, we could see that the earth and the heavens were no longer divided but that the earth is in the heavens. (105)
Quote by -Joseph Campbell
Modern romance, like Greek tragedy, celebrates the mystery of dismemberment, which is life in time. The happy ending is justly scorned as a misrepresentation; for the world, as we know it, as we have seen it, yields but one ending: death, disintegration, dismemberment, and the crucifixion of our heart with the passing of the forms that we have loved.
Quote by -Joseph Campbell
Mephistopheles, the machine man, can provide us with all the means, and is thus likely to determine the aims of life as well. But of course the characteristic of Faust, which makes him eligible to be saved, is that he seeks aims that are not those of the machine.
Quote by -Joseph Campbell
He must put aside his pride, his virtue, beauty and life and bow or submit to the absolutely intolerable.
Quote by -Joseph Campbell
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.
Quote by -Joseph Campbell
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.
Quote by -Joseph Campbell
And if there was no Fall, what then of the need for Redemption? What god was offended and by whom? Some especially touchy cave bear whose skull had been improperly enshrined?
Quote by -Joseph Campbell
What is a god? A god is a personification of a motivating power of a value system that functions in human life and in the universe.
Quote by -Joseph Campbell
The latest incarnation of Oedipus, the continued romance of Beauty and the Beast, stand this afternoon on the corner of 42nd Street and Fifth Avenue, waiting for the traffic light to change.
Quote by -Joseph Campbell
Man should not be in the service of society, society should be in the service of man. When man is in the service of society, you have a monster state, and that's what is threatening the world at this minute. ...
Quote by -Joseph Campbell
Now, when Luke Skywalker unmasks his father, he is taking off the machine role that the father has played. The father was the uniform. That is power, the state role.
Quote by -Joseph Campbell
..enlarge the pupil of the eye, so that the body with its attendant personality will no longer obstruct the view. Immortality is then experienced as a present fact...
Quote by -Joseph Campbell
Perhaps some of us have to go through dark and devious ways before we can find the river of peace or the highroad to the soul's destination.
Quote by -Joseph Campbell
Clearly, mythology is no toy for children. Nor is it a matter of archaic, merely scholarly concern, of no moment to modern men of action. For its symbols (whether in the tangible form of images or in the abstract form of ideas) touch and release the deepest centers of motivation, moving literate and illiterate alike, moving mobs, moving civilizations.
Quote by -Joseph Campbell
For we have not even to risk the adventure alone, for the heros of all time have gone before us...
Quote by -Joseph Campbell
If there were already a path, it would have to be someone else's; the whole point is to find your own way.
Quote by -Joseph Campbell
I don’t think people are really seeking the meaning of Life. I think we’re seeking an experience of being alive…we want to feel the rapture of being alive
Quote by -Joseph Campbell
Preachers err by trying to talk people into belief; better they reveal the radiance of their own discovery.
Quote by -Joseph Campbell
But the makers of legend have seldom rested content to regard the world's great heroes as mere human beings who broke past the horizons that limited their fellows and returned such boons as any man with equal faith and courage might have found.
Quote by -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.
Quote by -Joseph Campbell
[Comedies], in the ancient world, were regarded as of a higher rank than tragedy, of a deeper truth, of a more difficult realization, of a sounder structure, and of a revelation more complete. 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.... Tragedy is the shattering of the forms and of our attachments to the forms; comedy, the wild and careless, inexhaustible joy of life invincible.
Quote by -Joseph Campbell
The problem in our society and in our schools is to inclulcate, without overdoing it, the notion of education, as in the Latin educere--to lead, to bring out what is in someone rather than merely to indoctrinate him/her from the outside. (89)
Quote by -Joseph Campbell
You enter the forest at the darkest point, where there is no path. Where there is a way or path, it is someone else's path. You are not on your own path. If you follow someone else's way, you are not going to realize your potential.
Quote by -Joseph Campbell
Myth must be kept alive. The people who can keep it alive are the artists of one kind or another.
Quote by -Joseph Campbell
How teach again, however, what has been taught correctly and incorrectly learned a thousand thousand times, throughout the millenniums of mankind's prudent folly? That is the hero's ultimate difficult task.
Quote by -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.
Quote by -Joseph Campbell
I always feel uncomfortable when people speak about ordinary mortals because I've never met an ordinary man, woman or child.
Quote by -Joseph Campbell
The black moment is the moment when the real message of transformation is going to come. At the darkest moment comes the light.
Quote by -Joseph Campbell
Not all who hesitate are lost. The psyche has many secrets in reserve. And these are not disclosed unless required.
Quote by -Joseph Campbell
What we are really living for is the experience of life, both the pain and the pleasure.
Quote by -Joseph Campbell
A bit of advice Given to a young Native American At 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.
Quote by -Joseph Campbell
There seem to be only two kinds of people: Those who think that metaphors are facts, and those who know that they are not facts. Those who know they are not facts are what we call "atheists," and those who think they are facts are "religious." Which group really gets the message?
Quote by -Joseph Campbell
The first step to the knowledge of the wonder and mystery of life is the recognition of the monstrous nature of the earthly human realm as well as its glory, the realization that this is just how it is and that it cannot and will not be changed. Those who think they know how the universe could have been had they created it, without pain, without sorrow, without time, without death, are unfit for illumination.
Quote by -Joseph Campbell
Life is like arriving late for a movie, having to figure out what was going on without bothering everybody with a lot of questions, and then being unexpectedly called away before you find out how it ends.
Quote by -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.
Quote by -Joseph Campbell
The psychological dangers through which earlier generations were guided by the symbols and spiritual exercises of their mythological and religious inheritance, we today (in so far as we are unbelievers, or, if believers, in so far as our inherited beliefs fail to represent the real problems of contemporary life) must face alone, or, at best with only tentative, impromptu, and not often very effective guidance. This is our problem as modern, "enlightened" individuals, for whom all gods and devils have been rationalized out of existence.
Quote by -Joseph Campbell