If you want to ask me how you should live your life, I ask you what is the most meaningful thing to you, your raison d’être (reason for existence), and suggest you ally yourself with that (your bliss).
– Joseph Campbell: A Fire in the Mind: The Authorized Biography, Stephen Larsen and Robin Larsen
…what is the nature of the wasteland? It is a land where everybody is living an inauthentic life, doing as other people do, doing as you’re told, with no courage for your own life.
– The Power of Myth, Joseph Campbell with Bill Moyers
A person is a hero or heroine when he or she is functioning in the interests of values that are not local to the person but are of some greater force of which that person is a vehicle.
– Thou Art That: Transforming Religious Metaphor, Joseph Campbell
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.
– A Joseph Campbell Companion: Reflections on the Art of Living, Diane Osbon
Work begins when you don’t like what you’re doing.
– A Joseph Campbell Companion: Reflections on the Art of Living, Diane Osbon
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…when Luke Skywalker unmasks his father, he is taking off the machine role that the father has played… he’s a bureaucrat, living not in terms of himself but in terms of an imposed system.
– The Power of Myth, Joseph Campbell with Bill Moyers
No matter what the system of thought you may have, it can’t possibly include boundless life. When you think everything is just that way, the trickster arrives, and it all blows, and you get change and becoming again.
– The Power of Myth, Joseph Campbell with Bill Moyers
The person who thinks he has found the ultimate truth is wrong. There is an often-quoted verse in Sanskrit, which appears in the Chinese Tao-te Ching as well: “He who thinks he knows, doesn’t know. He who knows that he doesn’t know, knows.”
– The Power of Myth, Joseph Campbell with Bill Moyers
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