In marriage, you are not sacrificing yourself to the other person. You are sacrificing yourself to the relationship. You become mature when you become the authority of your own life. Life will always be sorrowful. We can't change it, but we can change our attitude toward it. Awe is what moves us forward.

— Joseph Campbell

In one of the Upanishads it says, when the glow of a sunset holds you, and you say 'Aha,' that is the recognition of the divinity. And when you say 'Aha' to an art object, that is a recognition of divinity. And what divinity is it? It is your divinity, which is the only divinity there is. We are all phenomenal manifestations of a divine will to live, and that will and the consciousness of life is one in all of us, and that is what artwork expresses.

— Joseph Campbell

In our society of fixed texts and printed words, it is the function of the poet to see the life value of the facts round about, and to deify them, as it were, to provide images that relate the everyday to the eternal.

— Joseph Campbell

Is the god the source, or is the god a human manner of conceiving of the force and energy that supports the world? In our tradition God is a male. This male and female differentiation is made, however, within the field of time and space, the field of duality. If God is beyond duality, you cannot say that God is a "He." You cannot say God is a "She." You cannot say God is an "It." (18)

— Joseph Campbell

It has always been the prime function of mythology and rite to supply the symbols that carry the human spirit forward, in counteraction to those that tend to tie it back.

— Joseph Campbell

I think the person who takes a job in order to live - that is to say, for the money - has turned himself into a slave.

— Joseph Campbell

I think the person who takes a job in order to live - that is to say, for the money [not for purpose or passion]- has turned himself into a slave.

— Joseph Campbell

It is by going down into the abyss that we recover the treasures of life. Where you stumble, there lies your treasure.

— Joseph Campbell

It is only when a man tames his own demons that he becomes the king of himself if not of the world.

— Joseph Campbell

It may be a species of impudence to think that the way you understand God is the way God is. (60).

— Joseph Campbell