Joseph Campbell Quotes

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.

I realize that my life is not the common ordinary person.

What do we teach our children? . . . We should say to each of them: Do you know what you are? You are a marvel. You are unique . . . You may become a Shakespeare, a Michelangelo, a Beethoven. You have the capacity for anything.

To consider oneself different from ordinary men is wrong, but it is right to hope that one will not remain like ordinary men.

There has never been, and never again will be a human being like you. There is nothing ordinary about you. If you feel ordinary, it is because you have chosen to hide the extraordinary parts of yourself from the world.

Don't wish to be normal. Wish to be yourself. To the hilt. Find out what you're best at, and develop it, and hopscotch your weaknesses. Wish to be great at whatever you are.

Everyone truly does have God-given gifts. Find them and use them, and don't let anyone else tell you that you are less than who you are.

Life did not intend to make us perfect. Whoever is perfect belongs in a museum.

You're never going to please everyone - you might as well be who God made you to be.

Just be yourself, there is no one better.

Life is too short to be anything but real with the cast of characters God has placed in the story of your life. Love well, laugh often, and find your life in Christ. Don't hide away or be a follower. Be the wonderful unique person God made you to be, and know that your purpose will always be best when defined by your faith in him

Today I am amazed at the things our children have done and their wide range of interests. They are all living their lives and not the ones I would have planned for them. But I have learned that their lives are theirs, not mine, and in living their own lives they have given me experiences and an education I would never have had if I'd been fool enough to make them do what I thought they should do.

The greater the spirit, the more one is alone.

Everything has its own place and function. That applies to people, although many don't seem to realize it, stuck as they are in the wrong job, the wrong marriage, or the wrong house. When you know and respect your Inner Nature, you know where you belong. You also know where you don't belong.

I am an ordinary person, but carried to extremes.

The sense of community does not arise out of collective movement, nor from conforming to some group direction. Quite the contrary. Each individual tends to use the opportunity to become all that he or she can become. Separateness and diversity - the uniqueness of being "me" - are experienced

What I mean is that those thoughts, they're human. And just because you turn out differently than everyone's imagined you would doesn't mean that you've failed in some way. A kid who gets teased in one school might move to a different one, and be the most popular girl there, just because no one has any other expectations of her. Or a person who goes to med school because his entire family is full of doctors might find out that what he really wants to be is an artist instead.

Talk about life - but in your own way.

We have to get children to understand that not only do they have this incredible uniqueness, but they also have something that sometimes we forget about. They are also potentiality. They are much more undiscovered than they are discovered. And there's the wonder of it. It doesn't matter where they are, they're only just beginning and the big magical trip of life is digging it all out and discovering the wonderful you.

I always feel uncomfortable when people speak about ordinary mortals because I've never met an ordinary man, woman or child.

It's sometimes quite astonishing that a single, average life is enough to encompass so much that it's at all possible ever to have any success in one's work here.

I've always been a freak and different, oddball even in my childhood and my own family, so I can relate to people who are struggling and trying to find their true identity. I do not sit in the seat of judgment. .. I love people for who they are. We're all God's children.

Success is about making your life a special version of unique that fits who you are - not what other people want you to be.

You are treading the path to your greatness: no one shall follow you here! Your passage has effaced the path behind you, and above that path stands written: Impossibility.

Each individual is unique in ordinary life. The uniqueness becomes even more sharp and clear, crystal clear, when the person becomes enlightened - because only then his pure genius, his pure individuality, uncontaminated, unpolluted, is revealed.