QuoteProject
In marriage you are not sacrificing yourself to the other person. You are sacrificing yourself to the relationship.
Joseph Campbell
ShareWTF𝕏

Interpretation

What this quote means

Marriage involves compromise not just for the partner, but for the strength of the relationship itself.

Joseph Campbell emphasizes that in a marriage, the sacrifices made are not merely for the individual partner, but rather for the enhancement and preservation of the relationship as a whole. This perspective highlights that a successful marriage is built on mutual commitment and shared growth, rather than individual loss.

Themes

MarriageRelationshipSacrificeCommitmentLove

In practice

Example use cases

In a wedding speech, you might say, 'As Joseph Campbell wisely pointed out, in marriage we’re not just giving ourselves to our partner, but to the relationship we build together.'

More from Joseph Campbell

No tribal rite has yet been recorded which attempts to keep winter from descending; on the contrary: the rites all prepare the community to endure, together with the rest of nature, the season of the terrible cold.
Joseph CampbellRead
Half the people in the world think that the metaphors of their religious traditions, for example, are facts. And the other half contends that they are not facts at all. As a result we have people who consider themselves believers because they accept metaphors as facts, and we have others who classify themselves as atheists because they think religious metaphors are lies.
Joseph CampbellRead
Christianity isn’t moving people’s lives today. What’s moving people’s lives is the stock market and the baseball scores. What are people excited about? It’s a totally materialistic level that has taken over the world. There isn’t even an ideal that anybody’s fighting for.
Joseph CampbellRead
Apocalypse does not point to a fiery Armageddon but to the fact that our ignorance and our complacency are coming to an end. The exclusivism of there being only one way in which we can be saved, the idea that there is a single religious group that is in sole possession of the truth—that is the world as we know it that must pass away. What is the kingdom? It lies in our realization of the ubiquity of the divine presence in our neighbors, in our enemies, in all of us.
Joseph CampbellRead
The demon that you can swallow gives you it’s power, and the greater life’s pain, the greater life’s reply.
Joseph CampbellRead
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?
Joseph CampbellRead

Similar quotes

Oh lovers! be careful in those dangerous first days! once you've brought breakfast in bed you'll have to bring it forever, unless you want to be accused of lovelessness and betrayal.
Milan KunderaRead
Just because some people are fueled by drama doesn't mean you have to attend the performance.
Cheryl RichardsonRead
He had lived and acted on the assumption that he was alone, and now he saw that he had not been. What he had done made others suffer. No matter how much he would long for them to forget him, they would not be able to. His family was a part of him, not only in blood, but in spirit.
Richard WrightRead
Marriage is like a three-speed gearbox - affection, friendship, love. It is not advisable to crash your gears and go right through to love straightaway. You need to ease your way through. The basis of love is respect, and that needs to be learned from affection and friendship.
Peter UstinovRead
In fact, people with mental illness are more likely to be the victims of violence rather than anything else. So it's important that we not stereotype folks with mental illness.
Vivek MurthyRead
If we treat people as they are, we make them worse. If we treat people as they ought to be, we help them become what they are capable of becoming.
Haim GinottRead

A little wisdom, now and then

Subscribe for the occasional hand-picked quote. No noise.