Joseph Campbell Quotes

Time is only an idea. There is only the Reality. Whatever you think it is, it looks like that. If you call it time, it is time. If you call it existence, it is existence, and so on. After calling it time, you divide it into days and nights, months, years, hours, minutes, etc. Time is immaterial for the Path of Knowledge.

That which comes and goes, rises and sets, is born and dies is the ego. That which always abides, never changes, and is devoid of qualities is the Self.

Existence is illusory and it is eternal.

God is the very creative energy of existence - creativity rather than a creator. He is not the poet but the poetry, not the dancer but the dance, not the flower but the fragrance.

The mind turned inwards is the Self; turned outwards, it becomes the ego and all the world. Cotton made into various clothes we call by various names. Gold made into various ornaments, we call by various names. But all the clothes are cotton and all the ornaments gold. The one is real, the many are mere names and forms.

I regard any behavior we indulge in as a game. The soul is beyond not only three-dimensional space but beyond the illusion of linear time. Any method we use to move through three- or four- dimensional space is a game. It doesn't matter how serious we take it, or how serious its consequences are.

There are times when I catch myself believing that there is such a thing as something; which is separate from something else.

Everything we see, everything that exists, is part of God.

What is life? A madness. What is life? An illusion, a shadow, a story. And the greatest good is little enough; for all life is a dream, and dreams themselves are only dreams.

All phenomena are empty.

If you can feel that Mother Earth is in you, and you are Mother Earth, then you are not any longer afraid to die because the earth is not dying. Like a wave appears and disappears and appears again.

True self is non-self, the awareness that the self is made only of non-self elements. There's no separation between self and other, and everything is interconnected.

Everything is Song. Everything is Silence. Since it all turns out to be illusion, perfectly being what it is, having nothing to do with good or bad, you are free to die laughing.

If time is not real, then the dividing line between this world and eternity, between suffering and bliss, between good and evil, is also an illusion.

You are the universe, you aren't in the universe.

The world is given to me only once, not one existing and one perceived. Subject and object are only one. The barrier between them cannot be said to have broken down as a result of recent experience in the physical sciences, for this barrier does not exist.

The soul is neither inside nor outside the body; neither proximate to nor separate from it.

The Qur'an, the universe, and humanity are three kinds of manifestations of one truth.

Someone should tell the fundamentalists that even Advaita philosophy in Hinduism talks of oneness in all existence.

If the ocean was pure mind and I was a wave, I would be in terror if Itried to distinguish myself fromthe water that produced me.What is a wave without water, and what is a mind without God?

The plurality that we perceive is only an appearance; it is not real. Vedantic philosophy... has sought to clarify it by a number of analogies, one of the most attractive being the many-faceted crystal which, while showing hundreds of little pictures of what is in reality a single existent object, does not really multiply that object.

The world, life and human beings are only an illusion, a phantom, a dream image.

If you understand, if you see, if you can feel and experience that you are not separate from existence, that you are one with it, all fear of death disappears because there is nobody to die inside you. In the first place there is nobody at all, existence lives through you.

The wave does not need to die to become water. She is already water.

If you can break the illusion that you are separate and begin to experience the oneness of the existence, that is yoga.