Follow your bliss and the universe will open doors for you where there were only walls.

— Joseph Campbell

Follow your bliss. Find where it is and don't be afraid to follow it.

— Joseph Campbell

For the bliss of the deep abode is not lightly abandoned in favor of the self-scattering of the wakened state,

— Joseph Campbell

Furthermore, we have not even to risk the adventure alone; for the heroes of all time have gone before us; the labyrinth is thoroughly known; we have only to follow the thread of the hero path. And where we had thought to find an abomination, we shall find a god; where we had thought to slay another, we shall slay ourselves; where we had thought to travel outward, we shall come to the center of our own existence; where we had thought to be alone, we shall be with all the world.

— Joseph Campbell

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

— Joseph Campbell

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 Campbell

Heresy is the life of a mythology and orthodoxy is the death.

— Joseph Campbell

How does the ordinary person come to the transcendent? For a start, I would say, study poetry. Learn how to read a poem. You need not have the experience to get the message, or at least some indication of the message. It may come gradually. (92)

— 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.

— Joseph Campbell

How to teach again what has been taught correctly it incorrectly 1000 thousand times, throughout the millenniums of mankind's prudent folly? That is the hero's ultimate difficult task. How to render back into light-world language the speech-defying pronouncements of the dark? Many failures attest to the difficulties of this life-affirmative threshold.

— Joseph Campbell