top of page
.png){kind=small}
"One finds the same basic mythological themes in all the religions of the world, from the most primitive to the most sophisticated, from the North American plains to European forests to Polynesian atolls. The imagery of myth is a language, a lingua franca that expresses something basic about our deepest humanity. It is variously inflected in its various provinces."
Standard
Customized
Exlpore more Culture quotes
"Retro is a symptom of a generation that is too lazy to innovate."
"Our culture has bred consumers and addicts. We eat too much, buy too much, and want too much. We set ourselves on the fruitless mission of filling the gaping hole within us with material things. Blindly, we consume more and more, believing we are hungry for more food, status, or money, yet really we are hungry for connection."
"The Frenchman works until he can play. The American works until he can't play; and then thanks the devil, his master, that he is donkey enough to die in harness. But the Englishman, as he has since become, works until he can pretend that he never worked at all."
"I see Lord Buddha in the 21st Century across national borders, across faith systems, across political ideologies, playing the role of a bridge to promote understanding to counsel patience and to enlighten us with tolerance and empathy."
"Culture, religion, and education, are conspiracies to standardize worldviews."
"Confession. Years ago, I was invited to a cocktail party for an Asian-American networking group. As I introduced myself to a Japanese businessman, I reached out and firmly shook his hand. Much to my embarrassment now, I automatically took my other hand and wrapped our hands in a "hand hug. This is a common gesture of friendship in the South. As his wife approached, however, she appeared appalled and felt disrespected that I was touching her husband. Our cultural differences were marked. Despite this cultural mishap, I was able to redeem myself. We all moved past it and delighted in an interesting conversation. Physical touch is a touchy topic (pun intended), especially when various cultures are involved."
"Culture is a symbolic veil with which we hide our animal nature from ourselves - and other animals."
Explore more quotes by Joseph Campbell
"Dream is the personalized myth, myth the depersonalized dream; both myth and dream are symbolic in the same general way of the dynamic of the psyche. But in the dream the forms are quirked by the peculiar troubles of the dreamer, whereas in myth the problems and solutions sown are directly valid for all mankind."
"You can get a lot of work done if you stay with it and are excited and its play instead of work."
"The Garden is a metaphor for the following: our minds, and our thinking in terms of pairs of opposites--man and woman, good and evil--are as holy as that of a god."
"If you do follow your bliss you put yourself on a kind of track that has been there all the while, waiting for you, and the life that you ought to be living is the one you are living. Follow your bliss and don't be afraid, and doors will open where you didn't know they were going to be."
"When you are on your path, and it is truly your path, doors will open for you where there were no doors for someone else."
"We're in a free fall into the future. We don't know where we're going. Things are changing so fast. And always when you're going through a long tunnel, anxiety comes along. But all you have to do to transform your hell into a paradise is to turn your fall into a voluntary act. It's a very interesting shift of perspective . . . Joyfully participate in the sorrows of the world and everything changes."
"The goal of life is to make your heartbeat match the beat of the universe, to match your nature with Nature."
"Mythology is composed by poets out of their insights and realizations. Mythologies are not invented they are found. You can no more tell us what your dream is going to be tonight than we can invent a myth. Myths come from the mystical region of essential experience."
"Comedies, in the ancient world, were regarded as of a higher rank than tragedy, of a deeper truth, of a more difficult realization, of a sounder structure, and of a revelation more complete. The happy ending of the fairy tale, the myth, and the divine comedy of the soul, is to be read, not as a contradiction, but as a transcendence of the universal tragedy of man.... Tragedy is the shattering of the forms and of our attachments to the forms; comedy, the wild and careless, inexhaustible joy of life invincible."
"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."
bottom of page