We're so engaged in doing things
by Joseph Campbell

We're so engaged in doing things
to achieve purposes of outer value
that we forget the inner value,
the rapture that is associated
with being alive, is what it is all about.
- Joseph Campbell

Related topics: Inspirational Values Purpose

Life is without meaning.
You bring the meaning to it.
The meaning of life is
whatever you ascribe it to be.
Being alive is the meaning.
- Joseph Campbell

The world is perfect. It's a mess.
It has always been a mess.
We are not going to change it.
Our job is to straighten out our own lives.
- Joseph Campbell

The cave you fear to enter holds the treasure you seek.
- Joseph Campbell

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Thank you for joining me on this journey we call life,
- Jonathan Lockwood Huie

We must be willing to get rid of the life we've planned,
so as to have the life that is waiting for us.
The old skin has to be shed before the new one can come.
- Joseph Campbell

When you follow your bliss,
doors will open for you
that wouldn't have opened for anyone else.
- Joseph Campbell

Follow your bliss and doors will open
where there were no doors before.
- Joseph Campbell

When you make the sacrifice in marriage,
you're sacrificing not to each other
but to unity in a relationship.
- Joseph Campbell

Myths are public dreams, dreams are private myths.
- Joseph Campbell

It is by going down into the abyss
that we recover the treasures of life.
Where you stumble, there lies your treasure.
- Joseph Campbell

Opportunities to find deeper powers within ourselves
come when life seems most challenging.
- Joseph Campbell

Your life is the fruit of your own doing.
You have no one to blame but yourself.
- Joseph Campbell

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.
- Joseph Campbell

The big question is whether you are going to be able
to say a hearty yes to your adventure.
- Joseph Campbell

When you follow your bliss, you put yourself on a kind of track
that has been there all the while waiting for you,
and the life you ought to be living is the one you are living.
When you can see that, you begin to meet people
who are in the field of your bliss,
and they open the doors to you.
I say, follow your bliss and don't be afraid,
and doors will open where you didn't know they were going to be.
If you follow your bliss,
doors will open for you that wouldn't have opened for anyone else.
- Joseph Campbell

We must let go of the life we have planned,
so as to accept the one that is waiting for us.
- Joseph Campbell

When we quit thinking primarily about ourselves
and our own self-preservation,
we undergo a truly heroic transformation of consciousness.
- Joseph Campbell

A hero is someone who has given his life to
something bigger than himself
or something other than himself.
- Joseph Campbell

Find a place inside where there's joy,
and the joy will burn out the pain.
- Joseph Campbell

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

I don't believe people are looking for the meaning of life
as much as they are looking for the experience of being alive.
- Joseph Campbell

The privilege of a lifetime is being who you are.
- Joseph Campbell

I think the person who takes a job in order to live -
that is to say, for the money -
has turned himself into a slave.
- Joseph Campbell

God is a metaphor for that which transcends
all levels of intellectual thought.
It's as simple as that.
- Joseph Campbell

When people get married because they think
it's a long-time love affair,
they'll be divorced very soon,
because all love affairs end in disappointment.
But marriage is a recognition of a spiritual identity.
- Joseph Campbell

God is Within You!
You yourself are the creator.
If you find that place within you
from which you brought this thing about,
you will be able to live with it and affirm it,
perhaps even enjoy it, as your life.
- Joseph Campbell

I don't have to have faith, I have experience.
- Joseph Campbell

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

When you follow your bliss... doors will open
where you would not have thought there would be doors,
and where there wouldn't be a door for anyone else.
- Joseph Campbell

Is the system going to flatten you out
and deny you your humanity,
or are you going to be able to make use of the system
to the attainment of human purposes?
- Joseph Campbell

Love is a friendship set to music.
- Joseph Campbell

One way or another, we all have to find
what best fosters the flowering of our humanity
in this contemporary life,
and dedicate ourselves to that.
- Joseph Campbell

Participate joyfully in the sorrows of the world.
We cannot cure the world of sorrows,
but we can choose to live in joy.
- Joseph Campbell

Every religion is true one way or another.
It is true when understood metaphorically.
But when it gets stuck in its own metaphors,
interpreting them as facts, then you are in trouble.
- Joseph Campbell

Computers are like Old Testament gods;
lots of rules and no mercy.
- Joseph Campbell

The key to success, and to happiness,
is being fully engaged in life -
leading yourself with inspiration and committed action -
setting your own fine and honorable example.
- Jonathan Lockwood Huie

Life is a constant opponent,
and an overpowering adversary if attacked directly.
The successful and happy ones dance lightly with life -
a parry here, a feint there - always engaged,
but never in the direct line of life's heaviest blows.
- Jonathan Lockwood Huie

If what is seen and experienced is portrayed
in the language of logic,
we are engaged in science.
If it is communicated through forms
whose connections are not accessible
to the conscious mind but are
recognized intuitively as meaningful,
then we are engaged in art.
- Albert Einstein

Insanity is doing the same thing, over and over again,
but expecting different results.
- Rita Mae Brown, also attributed to Einstein

Don't underestimate the value of Doing Nothing,
of just going along,
listening to all the things you can't hear,
and not bothering.
- A. A. Milne (Winnie-The-Pooh)

Never interrupt someone doing what you said couldn't be done.
- Amelia Earhart

It isn't what you have, or who you are, or where you are,
or what you are doing that makes you happy or unhappy.
It is what you think about.
- Dale Carnegie

The simplest questions are the most profound.
Where were you born?
Where is your home?
Where are you going?
What are you doing?
Think about these once in a while
and watch your answers change.
- Richard Bach

Men of lofty genius,
when they are doing the least work,
are most active.
- Leonardo da Vinci

It is better to displease the people
by doing what you know is right.
- William J. H. Boetcker

Happiness is mostly a by-product of doing what makes us feel fulfilled.
- Benjamin Spock

The fact is, that to do anything in the world worth doing,
we must not stand back shivering and thinking of the cold and danger,
but jump in and scramble through as well as we can.
- Robert Cushing

I do the very best I know how -
the very best I can;
and I mean to keep on doing so until the end.
- Abraham Lincoln

No man who is occupied in doing a very difficult thing,
and doing it very well, ever loses his self-respect.
- George Bernard Shaw

A warrior acts as if he knows what he is doing,
when in effect he knows nothing.
- Carlos Castaneda

Never let your sense of morals
get in the way of doing what's right.
- Isaac Asimov

Start by doing what's necessary;
then do what's possible;
and suddenly you are doing the impossible.
- St. Francis of Assisi

Far and away the best prize that life has to offer
is the chance to work hard at work worth doing.
- Theodore Roosevelt

I believe that every human mind feels pleasure
in doing good to another.
- Thomas Jefferson

The difference between what we do
and what we are capable of doing
would suffice to solve most of the world's problem.
- Mohandas (Mahatma) Gandhi

Do not look for approval
except for the consciousness of doing your best.
- Andrew Carnegie

Life's most urgent question is:
what are you doing for others?
- Martin Luther King, Jr.

Insanity is doing the same thing over and over again
and expecting different results.
- Albert Einstein (attributed)

The Tao of the sage is work without effort.
Practice non-action. Work without doing.
- Lao Tzu

The definition of insanity is doing the same thing
over and over and expecting different results.
- Albert Einstein

The right to do something doesn't mean that doing it is right.
- William Safire

Be a Human BEing Rather Than a Human DOing.
- Anonymous

I believe that anyone can conquer fear
by doing the things he fears to do,
provided he keeps doing them until he gets
a record of successful experience behind him.
- Eleanor Roosevelt

Do the thing you fear to do and keep on doing it -
that is the quickest and surest way
ever yet discovered to conquer fear.
- Dale Carnegie

I was brought up to believe that the only thing worth doing
was to add to the sum of accurate information in the world.
- Margaret Mead

Common sense is the knack of seeing things as they are,
and doing things as they ought to be done.
- Josh Billings

The Master acts without doing, and everything gets done.
- Lao Tzu

The great pleasure in life is doing
what people say you cannot do.
- Walter Bagehot

Determine never to be idle.
No person will have occasion to complain
of the want of time who never loses any.
It is wonderful how much may be done if we are always doing.
- Thomas Jefferson

It is no use saying, "We are doing our best."
You have got to succeed in doing what is necessary.
- Winston Churchill

You either do it completely and utterly,
or you should stop doing it.
- Bono (paraphrase)

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May the world be kind to you, and may your own thoughts be gentle upon yourself.
- Jonathan Lockwood Huie