Quotes from Joseph Campbell

Human beings are born too soon; they are unfinished, unready as yet to meet the world. Consequently their whole defense from a universe of dangers is the mother, under whose protection the intra-uterine period is prolonged.

Chodte za svojim stastim a vesmir vam otvori dvere aj tam, kde dovtedy boli iba mury.

Oriental idea: you don't teach until you are asked. You don't force your mission down people's throats.) And so the boy

And so every one of us shares the supreme ordeal--carries the cross of the redeemer--not in the bright moments of his tribe's great victories, but in the silences of his personal despair.

Only when that mortal "you" will have erased everything about itself that it cherishes and is holding to, will "you" have come to the brink of an experience of identity with that Being which is no being yet is the Being beyond the nonbeing of all things. Nor is It anything that you have ever known, ever named, or even thought about in this world:

Our own poor poets, I am afraid, have been so intimidated by our clinics and laboratories that they have abandoned the first principles of beginning, that of the festival; and the heart of the festival has always been the atmosphere of myth, of delight.

I am Shiva — this is the great meditation of the yogis in the Himalayas . . . Heaven and hell are within us, and all the gods are within us . . . all the gods, all the heavens, all the worlds, are within us.

The hero is the champion of things becoming, not of things become, because he is.

A hero is someone who has given his or her life to something bigger than oneself.

A hero ventures forth from the world of common day into a region of supernatural wonder: fabulous forces are there encountered and a decisive victory is won: the hero comes back from this mysterious adventure with the power to bestow boons on his fellow man.[6

Moyers: {TS] Eliot speaks about the still point of the turning world, where motion and stasis are together, the hub where the movement of time and the stillness of eternity are together.

The position of the palms together- this we use when we pray, do we not? That is a greeting that says that the god that is in you recognises the god in the other. These people are aware of the divine presence in all things.