Joseph Campbell Quotes About Universe

Quotes about: Universe

• The goal of life is to make your heartbeat match the beat of the universe, to match your nature with Nature.

  Joseph Campbell

  Inspirational, Life, Spiritual

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

  Joseph Campbell

  Inspirational, Life, Faith

• Could God exist if nobody else did? No. That’s why gods are very avid for worshipers. If there is nobody to worship them, there are no gods. There are as many gods as there are people thinking about God. In choosing your god, you choose your way of looking at the universe. There are plenty of Gods. Choose yours. The god you worship is the god you deserve.

  Joseph Campbell

  Thinking, Avid, People

• The first step to the knowledge of the wonder and mystery of life is the recognition of the monstrous nature of the earthly human realm as well as its glory, the realization that this is just how it is and that it cannot and will not be changed. Those who think they know how the universe could have been had they created it, without pain, without sorrow, without time, without death, are unfit for illumination.

  Joseph Campbell

  Inspirational, Time, Pain

• The notion of this universe, its heavens, hells, and everything within it, as a great dream dreamed by a single being in which all the dream characters are dreaming too, has in India enchanted and shaped the entire civilization.

  Joseph Campbell

  Dream, Character, Civilization

  Joseph Campbell, M. J. Abadie (1981). “The Mythic Image”, p.7, Princeton University Press

• Just think, Vishnu sleeps in the cosmic ocean, and the lotus of the universe grows from his navel. On the lotus sits Brahma, the creator. Brahma opens his eyes, and a world comes into being, governed by an Indra. Brahma closes his eyes, and a world goes out of being. The life of a Brahma is 432,000 years. When he dies, the lotus goes back, and another lotus is formed, and another Brahma. Then think of the galaxies beyond galaxies in infinite space, each a lotus, with a Brahma sitting on it, opening his eyes, closing his eyes.

  Joseph Campbell

  Ocean, Sleep, Eye

  Joseph Campbell, Bill Moyers (2011). “The Power of Myth”, p.77, Anchor

• Anyone who has had an experience of mystery knows that there is a dimension of the universe that is not that which is available to his senses. There is a pertinent saying in one of the Upanishads: When before the beauty of a sunset or of a mountain you pause and exclaim, ‘Ah,’ you are participating in divinity. Such a moment of participation involves a realization of the wonder and sheer beauty of existence. People living in the world of nature experience such moments every day. They live in the recognition of something there that is much greater than the human dimension.

  Joseph Campbell

  Inspirational, Sunset, People

  Joseph Campbell, Bill Moyers (2011). “The Power of Myth”, p.258, Anchor

• In the older view the goddess Universe was alive, herself organically the Earth, the horizon, and the heavens. Now she is dead, and the universe is not an organism, but a building, with gods at rest in it in luxury: not as personifications of the energies in their manners of operation, but as luxury tenants, requiring service. And Man, accordingly, is not as a child born to flower in the knowledge of his own eternal portion but as a robot fashioned to serve.

  Joseph Campbell

  Children, Flower, Men

• What is a god? A god is a personification of a motivating power of a value system that functions in human life and in the universe.

  Joseph Campbell

  Inspirational, God, Function

  Joseph Campbell, Bill Moyers (2011). “The Power of Myth”, p.28, Anchor

• We know that Jesus could not have ascended to heaven because there is no physical heaven anywhere in the universe. Even ascending at the speed of light, Jesus would still be in the galaxy.

  Joseph Campbell

  Jesus, Light, Heaven

  Joseph Campbell, Bill D. Moyers (1988). “The Power of Myth”, Harmony

• Poetry comes out of an elite experience, the experience of people whose ears are opened to the song of the universe.

  Joseph Campbell

  Song, People, Ears

  Joseph Campbell, Bill Moyers (2011). “The Power of Myth”, p.107, Anchor

• In choosing your god, you choose your way of looking at the universe. There are plenty of Gods. Choose yours.

  Joseph Campbell

  Way, Plenty, You Choose

• The mighty hero of extraordinary powers, able to lift Mount Govardhan on a finger, and to fill himself with the terrible glory of the universe, is each of us: not the physical self visible in the mirror, but the King within.

  Joseph Campbell

  Kings, Hero, Mirrors

  Joseph Campbell (2008). “The Hero with a Thousand Faces”, p.315, New World Library

• What you have to do, you do with play. The universe is God’s play.

  Joseph Campbell

  Play, Universe

• For those in whom a local mythology still works, there is an experience both of accord with the social order, and of harmony with the universe. For those, however, in whom the authorized signs no longer work-or, if working, produce deviant effects-there follows inevitably a sense both of dissociation from the local social nexus and of quest, within and without, for life, which the brain will take to be for 'meaning'.

  Joseph Campbell

  Order, Brain, Quests

  Joseph Campbell (1991). “The Masks of God: Creative Mythology”, Penguin Group USA

• The world, as we know it, is coming to an end. The world as the center of the universe, the world divided from the heavens, the world bound by horizons in which love is reserved for members of the in-group: that is the world that is passing away. Apocalypse does not point to a fiery Armageddon but to the fact that our ignorance and complacency are coming to an end.

  Joseph Campbell

  Ignorance, Love Is, Heaven

  Joseph Campbell (2001). “Thou Art that: Transforming Religious Metaphor”, p.107, New World Library

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