Joseph Campbell
“As you proceed through life, following your own path, birds will shit on you. Don't bother to brush it off. 

​Getting a comedic view of your situation gives you spiritual distance. Having a sense of humor saves you.”

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

​“I don't believe people are looking for the meaning of life as much as they are looking for the experience of being alive.”
“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, you don’t know who your friends are, you don’t know what you owe anybody, you don’t know what anybody owes to you.

​This is a place where you can simply experience and bring forth what you are and what you might be. This is the place of creative incubation.

​At first you may find that nothing happens there. But if you have a sacred place and use it, something eventually will happen.”
“We have not even to risk the adventure alone for the heroes of all time have gone before us. The labyrinth is thoroughly known,
we have only to follow the thread of the hero path. 

​And where we had thought to find an abomination we shall find a God.

And where we had thought to slay another we shall slay ourselves. Where we had thought to travel outwards we shall come to the center of our own existence. And where we had thought to be alone we shall be with all the world.”
“The agony of breaking through personal limitations is the agony of spiritual growth. Art, literature, myth and cult, philosophy, and ascetic disciplines are instruments to help the individual past his limiting horizons into spheres of ever-expanding realization.

As he crosses threshold after threshold, conquering dragon after dragon, the stature of the divinity that he summons to his highest wish increases, until it subsumes the cosmos.

​Finally, the mind breaks the bounding sphere of the cosmos to a realization transcending all experiences of form - all symbolizations, all divinities: a realization of the ineluctable void.”
Herman Hesse
"I do not consider myself less ignorant than most people. I have been and still am a seeker, but I have ceased to question stars and books. I have begun to listen to the teachings my blood whispers to me.

​ My story is not a pleasant one; it is neither sweet nor harmonious, as invented stories are; it has the taste of nonsense and chaos, of madness and dreams -- like the lives of all men who stop deceiving themselves."
"I live in my dreams — that's what you sense. Other people live in dreams, but not in their own. That's the difference."
Photo used under Creative Commons from phalinn