Joseph Campbell Quotes

You grow your best thoughts in silence, solitude, and meditation. When you relax and think deeply, you are giving your inmost powers their best opportunity to disclose themselves.

Inspiration comes to us slowly and quietly . prime it with a little solitude.

We can't underestimate the value of silence. We need to create ourselves, need to spend time alone. If you don't, you risk not knowing yourself and not realizing your dreams.

We've known about the transcendent power of solitude for centuries; it's only recently that we've forgotten it.

Solitude is not an absence of energy or action, as some believe, but is rather a boon of wild provisions transmitted to us from the soul. In ancient times, purposeful solitude was both palliative and preventative. It was used to heal fatigue and to prevent weariness. It was also used as an oracle, as a way of listening to the inner self to solicit advice and guidance otherwise impossible to hear in the din of daily life.

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 a place where you can simply experience and bring forth what you are and what you might be.

One of the greatest necessities in America is to discover creative solitude.

When from our better selves we have too long been parted by the hurrying world, and droop. Sick of its business, of its pleasures tired, how gracious, how benign is solitude.

I use solitude as a judge and as a person - a lot.

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

Solitude is the salt of personhood. It brings out the authentic flavor of every experience.

Each soul must meet the morning sun, the new sweet earth and the Great Silence alone.

Puttering is really a time to be alone, to dream, to get in touch with yourself...To putter is to discover.

The necessary thing is after all but this; solitude, great inner solitude. Going into oneself for hours meeting no one - this one must be able to attain.

Being alone has a power over me that never fails. My interior dissolves (for the time being only superficially) and is ready to release what lies deeper. When I am willfully alone, a slight ordering of my interior begins to take place and I need nothing more.

...good things happen to the human spirit when it is left alone.

Stop looking for something out there and begin seeing within.

We are so afraid of silence that we chase ourselves from one event to the next in order not to have to spend a moment alone with ourselves, in order not to have to look at ourselves in the mirror.

Only in quietness do we possess our own minds and discover the resources of the Inner Life.

Solitude is the best nurse of wisdom.

I've never just been able to be alone, and I'm obsessed with being alone and hearing my thoughts. I'm trying to take this alone time — the five minutes I do have a day — to learn as much as I can.

If you fail to go within, you will go without.

Not only does silence give us a chance to understand ourselves better, to get a truer and more balanced perspective on our own lives in relation to the lives of others: silence makes us whole if we let it. Silence helps draw together the scattered and dissipated energies of a fragmented existence.

The difference between me and many young people is, I don't carry music with me. I like to think. I don't use any modern convenience to be talking to other people, because I like my time to think. I go to the garden in the morning, and this time, I'm thinking ideas, I'm not drawing, I'm thinking.