“Revolution doesn’t have to do with smashing something; it has to do with bringing something forth. If you spend all your time thinking about that which you are attacking, then you are negatively bound to it. You have to find the zeal in yourself and bring that out.”
– Joseph Campbell
“Nirvana is the condition that comes when you are not compelled by desire, by fear or by social commitments – when you hold your center and act out of there.”
– Joseph Campbell
“What is the ‘meaning’ of a tree? of a butterfly? of the birth of a child? or of the universe? What is the ‘meaning’ of the song of the rushing stream? Such wonders simply are. They are antecedent to meaning, though ‘meanings’ may be read into them…So, likewise, are the images of myth, which open like flowers to the conscious mind’s amazement and may then be searched to the root for ‘meaning,’ as well as arranged to serve practical ends.”
– Joseph Campbell, The Flight of the Wild Gander
“Significant images render insights beyond speech, beyond the kinds of meaning speech defines. And if they do not speak to you, that is because you are not ready for them, and words will only serve to make you think you have understood, thus cutting you off altogether. You don’t ask what a dance means, you enjoy it. You don’t ask what the world means, you enjoy it. You don’t ask what you mean, you enjoy yourself; or at least, so you do when you are up to snuff.
“But to enjoy the world requires something more than mere good health and good spirits; for this world, as we all now surely know, is horrendous. ‘All life,’ said the Buddha, ‘is sorrowful’; and so, indeed, it is. Life consuming life: that is the essence of its being, which is forever a becoming. ‘The world,’ said the Buddha, ‘is an ever-burning fire.’ And so it is. And that is what one has to affirm, with a yea! a dance! a knowing, solemn, stately dance of the mystic bliss beyond pain that is at the heart of every mythic rite.”
– Joseph Campbell (Myths to Live By)
“People say that what we are seeking is a meaning of life. I don’t think this is what we’re really seeking. I think what we’re seeking is an experience of being alive.”
– Joseph Campbell