We're so engaged in doing things
to achieve purposes of outer value
that we forget the inner value,
the rapture that is associated
with being alive, is what it is all about.
- Joseph Campbell
Every religion is true one way or another.
It is true when understood metaphorically.
But when it gets stuck in its own metaphors,
interpreting them as facts, then you are in trouble.
- Joseph Campbell
The cave you fear to enter holds the treasure you seek.
- Joseph Campbell
Computers are like Old Testament gods;
lots of rules and no mercy.
- Joseph Campbell
We must be willing to get rid of the life we've planned,
so as to have the life that is waiting for us.
The old skin has to be shed before the new one can come.
- Joseph Campbell
The world is perfect. It's a mess.
It has always been a mess.
We are not going to change it.
Our job is to straighten out our own lives.
- Joseph Campbell
Life is without meaning.
You bring the meaning to it.
The meaning of life is
whatever you ascribe it to be.
Being alive is the meaning.
- Joseph Campbell
Participate joyfully in the sorrows of the world.
We cannot cure the world of sorrows,
but we can choose to live in joy.
- Joseph Campbell
I don't believe people are looking for the meaning of life
as much as they are looking for the experience of being alive.
- Joseph Campbell
When you follow your bliss,
doors will open for you
that wouldn't have opened for anyone else.
- Joseph Campbell
The goal of life is
to make your heartbeat match the beat of the universe,
to match your nature with Nature.
- Joseph Campbell
The big question is whether you are going to be able
to say a hearty yes to your adventure.
- Joseph Campbell
When you follow your bliss, you put yourself on a kind of track
that has been there all the while waiting for you,
and the life you ought to be living is the one you are living.
When you can see that, you begin to meet people
who are in the field of your bliss,
and they open the doors to you.
I say, follow your bliss and don't be afraid,
and doors will open where you didn't know they were going to be.
If you follow your bliss,
doors will open for you that wouldn't have opened for anyone else.
- Joseph Campbell
One way or another, we all have to find
what best fosters the flowering of our humanity
in this contemporary life,
and dedicate ourselves to that.
- Joseph Campbell
When you follow your bliss... doors will open
where you would not have thought there would be doors,
and where there wouldn't be a door for anyone else.
- Joseph Campbell
Follow your bliss and doors will open
where there were no doors before.
- Joseph Campbell
God is a metaphor for that which transcends
all levels of intellectual thought.
It's as simple as that.
- Joseph Campbell
Your sacred space is where you can
find yourself again and again.
- Joseph Campbell
When you make the sacrifice in marriage,
you're sacrificing not to each other
but to unity in a relationship.
- Joseph Campbell
Myths are public dreams, dreams are private myths.
- Joseph Campbell
When we quit thinking primarily about ourselves
and our own self-preservation,
we undergo a truly heroic transformation of consciousness.
- Joseph Campbell
God is Within You!
You yourself are the creator.
If you find that place within you
from which you brought this thing about,
you will be able to live with it and affirm it,
perhaps even enjoy it, as your life.
- 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
Love is a friendship set to music.
- Joseph Campbell
Opportunities to find deeper powers within ourselves
come when life seems most challenging.
- Joseph Campbell
A hero is someone who has given his life to
something bigger than himself
or something other than himself.
- Joseph Campbell
Find a place inside where there's joy,
and the joy will burn out the pain.
- Joseph Campbell
The privilege of a lifetime is being who you are.
- Joseph Campbell
Is the system going to flatten you out
and deny you your humanity,
or are you going to be able to make use of the system
to the attainment of human purposes?
- Joseph Campbell
I don't have to have faith, I have experience.
- Joseph Campbell
Your life is the fruit of your own doing.
You have no one to blame but yourself.
- Joseph Campbell
When people get married because they think
it's a long-time love affair,
they'll be divorced very soon,
because all love affairs end in disappointment.
But marriage is a recognition of a spiritual identity.
- Joseph Campbell
We must let go of the life we have planned,
so as to accept the one that is waiting for us.
- 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
What each must seek in his life never was on land or sea.
It is something out of his own unique potentiality for experience,
something that never has been and never could
have been experienced by anyone else.
- Joseph Campbell
Life is a constant opponent,
and an overpowering adversary if attacked directly.
The successful and happy ones dance lightly with life -
a parry here, a feint there - always engaged,
but never in the direct line of life's heaviest blows.
- Jonathan Lockwood Huie
The key to success, and to happiness,
is being fully engaged in life -
leading yourself with inspiration and committed action -
setting your own fine and honorable example.
- Jonathan Lockwood Huie
If what is seen and experienced is portrayed
in the language of logic,
we are engaged in science.
If it is communicated through forms
whose connections are not accessible
to the conscious mind but are
recognized intuitively as meaningful,
then we are engaged in art.
- Albert Einstein
If life is a bowl of cherries, then what am I doing in the pits?
- Erma Bombeck
Anyone can do any amount of work
provided it isn't the work
he is supposed to be doing at the moment.
- Robert Benchley
Today is probably a good day for something;
but it's a better day for doing nothing.
- Jonathan Lockwood Huie
I only wish that ordinary people
had an unlimited capacity for doing harm;
then they might have an unlimited power for doing good.
- Socrates
People who say it cannot be done should not
interrupt those who are doing it.
- George Bernard Shaw
If I knew for a certainty that a man was coming to my house
with the conscious design of doing me good,
I should run for my life.
- Henry David Thoreau
There is no pleasure in having nothing to do;
the fun is in having lots to do and not doing it.
- Mary Wilson Little
The person who says it cannot be done
should not interrupt the person who is doing it.
- Chinese proverb
The most difficult thing in the world
is to know how to do a thing
and to watch somebody else doing it wrong,
without comment.
- Theodore. H. White
As for doing good; that is one of the professions which is full.
Moreover I have tried it fairly and, strange as it may seem,
am satisfied that it does not agree with my constitution.
- Henry David Thoreau
Never interrupt someone doing what you said couldn't be done.
- Amelia Earhart
Don't underestimate the value of Doing Nothing,
of just going along,
listening to all the things you can't hear,
and not bothering.
- A. A. Milne (Winnie-The-Pooh)
Insanity is doing the same thing, over and over again,
but expecting different results.
- Rita Mae Brown, also attributed to Einstein
It isn't what you have, or who you are, or where you are,
or what you are doing that makes you happy or unhappy.
It is what you think about.
- Dale Carnegie
When a stupid man is doing something he is ashamed of,
he always declares that it's his duty.
- George Bernard Shaw
You either do it completely and utterly,
or you should stop doing it.
- Bono (paraphrase)
If we all did the things we are capable of doing,
we would literally astound ourselves.
- Thomas Edison
It is important to do what you don't know how to do.
It is important to see your skills as keeping you
from learning what is deepest and most mysterious.
If you know how to focus, unfocus.
If your tendency is to make sense out of chaos, start chaos.
- Carlos Castaneda
Lives based on having are less free
than lives based on doing or being.
- E.Y. Harburg
My heroes are the ones who survived doing it wrong,
who made mistakes, but recovered from them.
- Bono
The simplest questions are the most profound.
Where were you born?
Where is your home?
Where are you going?
What are you doing?
Think about these once in a while
and watch your answers change.
- Richard Bach
Doing an injury puts you below your enemy;
revenging one make you but even with him;
forgiving it sets you above him.
- Benjamin Franklin [attributed]
Determine never to be idle.
No person will have occasion to complain
of the want of time who never loses any.
It is wonderful how much may be done if we are always doing.
- Thomas Jefferson
Far and away the best prize that life has to offer
is the chance to work hard at work worth doing.
- Theodore Roosevelt
Everyone enjoys doing the kind of work
for which he is best suited.
- Napoleon Hill
I believe that every human mind feels pleasure
in doing good to another.
- Thomas Jefferson
Not everyone is always going to like what you do.
Your job application, your book proposal,
your offer of marriage is going to
get rejected sometimes - perhaps often.
Your boss, your spouse, even the person
behind you in the supermarket checkout line
is occasionally going to think that you are doing it all wrong.
Don't take it personally.
- Jonathan Lockwood Huie
Always question WHY you are doing something.
Is it a free-will gift or an obligation?
That which is done out of a feeling of obligation
is unworkable as a substitute for a gift.
Obligation creates a feeling of resentment on your part,
and evokes resentment rather than gratitude
on the part of the recipient.
- Jonathan Lockwood Huie
Life's most persistent and urgent question is,
'What are you doing for others?'
- Martin Luther King, Jr.
The best preparation for tomorrow is doing your best today.
- H. Jackson Brown, Jr.
If we knew what it was we were doing,
it would not be called research, would it?
- Albert Einstein
If you're doing your best,
you won't have any time to worry about failure.
- H. Jackson Brown, Jr.
We keep moving forward, opening new doors,
and doing new things, because we're curious
and curiosity keeps leading us down new paths.
- Walt Disney
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May the world be kind to you,
and may your own thoughts be gentle upon yourself.
- Jonathan Lockwood Huie
All materials & writings are copyright © Jonathan Lockwood Huie, except for quotes and other specifically identified material which belong to their respective copyright holders if applicable.