The Power of Myth

by Joseph Campbell

Preachers err, he told me, by trying “to talk people into belief; better they reveal the radiance of their own discovery.”

People say that what we’re all seeking is a meaning for life. I don’t think that’s what we’re really seeking. I think that what we’re seeking is an experience of being alive, so that our life experiences on the purely physical plane will have resonances within our own innermost being and reality, so that we actually feel the rapture of being alive.

Marriage is not a simple love affair, it’s an ordeal, and the ordeal is the sacrifice of ego to a relationship in which two have become one.

A hero is someone who has given his or her life to something bigger than oneself.