Joseph Campbell

Life lives on life. This is the sense of the symbol of the Ouroboros, the serpent biting its tail. Everything that lives lives on the death of something else. Your own body will be food for something else. Anyone who denies this, anyone who holds back, is out of order. Death is an act of giving.

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.

Society has provided [children] no rituals by which they become members of the tribe, of the community. All children need to be twice born, to learn to function rationally in the present world, leaving childhood behind.

God is within you. You yourself are your creator. If you find that place in yourself 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.

Life will always be sorrowful. We can't change it, but we can change our attitude toward it.

You become mature when you become the authority of your own life.

In marriage you are not sacrificing yourself to the other person. You are sacrificing yourself to the relationship.

Privation and suffering alone open the mind to all that is hidden to others. (Igjugarjuk)

You are the Hero of your own Story.

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?

What each must seek in his life never was on land or sea. It is something out of his own unique potentiality for experience, something that never has been and never could have been experienced by anyone else.

One way or another, we all have to find what best fosters the flowering of our humanity in this contemporary life, and dedicate ourselves to that.

Your sacred space is where you can find yourself again and again.

Computers are like Old Testament gods; lots of rules and no mercy.

Every religion is true one way or another. It is true when understood metaphorically. But when it gets stuck in its own metaphors, interpreting them as facts, then you are in trouble.

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.

God is a metaphor for that which transcends all levels of intellectual thought. It's as simple as that.

Your life is the fruit of your own doing. You have no one to blame but yourself.

There is perhaps nothing worse than reaching the top of the ladder and discovering that you’re on the wrong wall.

You must have a room, or a certain hour or so a day, where you don’t know what was in the newspapers that morning, you don’t know who your friends are, you don’t know what you owe anybody, you don’t know what anybody owes to you. This is a place where you can simply experience and bring forth what you are and what you might be. This is the place of creative incubation. At first you may find that nothing happens there. But if you have a sacred place and use it, something eventually will happen.

All the gods, all the heavens, all the hells, are within you.