Joseph Campbell Quotes

If you want inner peace, find it in solitude, not speed, and if you would find yourself, look to the land from which you came and to which you go.

If you want to find God, hang out in the space between your thoughts.

Your sacred space is where you can find yourself again and again.

I was inspired to spend an entire year - my 65th year - reading, researching, and meditating on Lao-tzu's messages, practicing them and ultimately writing down these insights as I felt Lao-tzu wanted us to know them.

There are things that I value now that I didn't when I first went over there, like Zen Buddhism, which has become part of my life over the last couple years.

Om is the pointed piece and Dhyâna (meditation) is the friction.

Meditation is not a withdrawal from life. Meditation is a process of understanding oneself.

What I dislike least in my former self are the moments of prayer.

When I am liberated by silence, when I am no longer involved in the measurement of life, but in the living of it, I can discover a form of prayer in which there is effectively no distraction. My whole life becomes a prayer. My whole silence is full of prayer. The world of silence in which I am immersed contributes to my prayer.

Your love will deepen as your meditation deepens, and vice-versa: as your meditation blossoms, your love will also blossom.

I do hot yoga. I try to keep one hour a day where I have space to reflect and meditate and take care of me and what is going on inside. This way, I can be a better person to be around.

Meditation is a way to be narcissistic without hurting anyone

Going nowhere isn’t about turning your back on the world; it’s about stepping away now and then so that you can see the world more clearly and love it more deeply.

When I use the words 'inner journey', I simply mean that you have looked at one aspect of the journey in your life called 'outer', now try to look at another aspect of the journey called 'inner'. You have been running after money, now run after meditation. You have been running after power, now run after God. Both are running. Once you start running after meditation then one day I will tell you, 'Now drop meditation too. Now stop running.' And when you stop running then real meditation happens.

Prayer is like a secret garden made up of silence and rest and inwardness. But there are a thousand and one doors into this garden and we all have to find our own.

You must have a room, or a certain hour or so a day, where you don’t know what was in the newspapers that morning, you don’t know who your friends are, you don’t know what you owe anybody, you don’t know what anybody owes to you. This is a place where you can simply experience and bring forth what you are and what you might be. This is the place of creative incubation. At first you may find that nothing happens there. But if you have a sacred place and use it, something eventually will happen.

My own interest in Yoga came from a vague understanding of Indian thought and Indian philosophy in the late sixties and early seventies and from looking at the idea of meditation and at what meditation was.

I meditate. I need that time to stay true to who I am.

I found meditation. It was more out of pure desperation: I just started to wake up at 5 and sit for one hour, and suddenly, day after day, piece by piece, I could really feel I was coming back into me.

To develop our real selves, we need time alone for thought and meditation. To be always giving out and never pumping in, the well runs dry.

If you do not go within, you without

There is so much noise in the world! May we learn to be silent in our hearts and before God.

Creativity is secondary, meditation is basic and fundamental; everything should come out of your meditation. Then it will give you a beatitude, your being a new song, and it will help others to experience something of it. It will depend on their meditativeness.

The word must be heard in silence; there must be darkness to see the stars.

Quiet time and solitude are vital to helping me keep perspective. I consider myself fortunate to have so much quiet built into my profession. I spend long hours by myself at my easel. And while I work, I think-of the future, of my loved ones, of God's goodness and the many exciting opportunities that surround me. I ponder the challenges I face, the needs of others, the direction my life is going.