Diana > Diana's Quotes

“I always feel uncomfortable when people speak about ordinary mortals because I've never met an ordinary man, woman or child.”
― Joseph Campbell, The Power of Myth

“Mythology is not a lie, mythology is poetry, it is metaphorical. It has been well said that mythology is the penultimate truth--penultimate because the ultimate cannot be put into words. It is beyond words. Beyond images, beyond that bounding rim of the Buddhist Wheel of Becoming. Mythology pitches the mind beyond that rim, to what can be known but not told.”
― Joseph Campbell, The Power of Myth

“Marriage is not a love affair. A love affair is a totally different thing. A marriage is a commitment to that which you are. That person is literally your other half. And you and the other are one. A love affair isn't that. That is a relationship for pleasure, and when it gets to be unpleasurable, it's off. But a marriage is a life commitment, and a life commitment means the prime concern of your life. If marriage is not the prime concern, you're not married....The Puritans called marriage "the little church within the Church." In marriage, every day you love, and every day you forgive. It is an ongoing sacrament – love and forgiveness.... Like the yin/yang symbol....Here I am, and here she is, and here we are. Now when I have to make a sacrifice, I'm not sacrificing to her, I'm sacrificing to the relationship. Resentment against the other one is wrongly placed. Life in in the relationship, that's where your life now is. That's what a marriage is – whereas, in a love affair, you have two lives in a more or less successful relationship to each other for a certain length of time, as long as it seems agreeable.”
― Joseph Campbell, The Power of Myth

“The goal of life is to make your heartbeat match the beat of the universe, to match your nature with Nature.”
― Joseph Campbell, A Joseph Campbell Companion: Reflections on the Art of Living

“We're in a freefall into future. We don't know where we're going. Things are changing so fast, and always when you're going through a long tunnel, anxiety comes along. And all you have to do to transform your hell into a paradise is to turn your fall into a voluntary act. It's a very interesting shift of perspective and that's all it is... joyful participation in the sorrows and everything changes.”
― Joseph Campbell, Sukhavati:Place of Bliss

“When you realize that eternity is right here now, that it is within your possibility to experience the eternity of your own truth and being, then you grasp the following: That which you are was never born and will never die. . . . (90)”
― Joseph Campbell, Thou Art That: Transforming Religious Metaphor

“Our actual ultimate root is in our humanity, not in our personal genealogy.”
― Joseph Campbell, Myths to Live By

“The earliest god-kings were ritually slain every six years, eight years, or twelve, according to the various local orders; and with them the dignitaries of their courts, all casting off their bodies to be born again. It is a fantastic, noble, weirdly wonderful ideal, this of the individual who is nobody at all if not the incarnation, even unto death, of the one eternal, absolutely impersonal, cosmic law. And it is against this that the Occidental, or, more particularly, modern European, ideal of the individual must be measured.”
― Joseph Campbell, Myths to Live By

“Follow your bliss and the universe will open doors for you where there were only walls.”
― Joseph Campbell

“Life is like arriving late for a movie, having to figure out what was going on without bothering everybody with a lot of questions, and then being unexpectedly called away before you find out how it ends.”
― Joseph Campbell, Creative Mythology

“Myths are public dreams, dreams are private myths.”
― Joseph Campbell

“All religions are true but none are literal.”
― Joseph Campbell

“You have power over your mind - not outside events. Realize this, and you will find strength.”
― Marcus Aurelius, Meditations

“Dwell on the beauty of life. Watch the stars, and see yourself running with them.”
― Marcus Aurelius, Meditations

“The happiness of your life depends upon the quality of your thoughts.”
― Marcus Aurelius, Meditations

“Everything we hear is an opinion, not a fact. Everything we see is a perspective, not the truth.”
― Marcus Aurelius , Meditations

“Accept the things to which fate binds you, and love the people with whom fate brings you together,but do so with all your heart.”
― Marcus Aurelius, Meditations

“The soul becomes dyed with the colour of its thoughts.”
― Marcus Aurelius, Meditations

“The best revenge is to be unlike him who performed the injury.”
― Marcus Aurelius, Meditations

“If someone is able to show me that what I think or do is not right, I will happily change, for I seek the truth, by which no one was ever truly harmed. It is the person who continues in his self-deception and ignorance who is harmed.”
― Marcus Aurelius, Meditations

“Never let the future disturb you. You will meet it, if you have to, with the same weapons of reason which today arm you against the present.”
― Marcus Aurelius, Meditations

“Our life is what our thoughts make it.”
― Marcus Aurelius, Meditations

“How much more grievous are the consequences of anger than the causes of it.”
― Marcus Aurelius, Meditations

“When another blames you or hates you, or people voice similar criticisms, go to their souls, penetrate inside and see what sort of people they are. You will realize that there is no need to be racked with anxiety that they should hold any particular opinion about you.”
― Marcus Aurelius, Meditations

“The first rule is to keep an untroubled spirit. The second is to look things in the face and know them for what they are.”
― Marcus Aurelius, Meditations

“Listen with curiosity. Speak with honesty. Act with integrity. The greatest problem with communication is we don’t listen to understand. We listen to reply. When we listen with curiosity, we don’t listen with the intent to reply. We listen for what’s behind the words.”
― Roy T. Bennett, The Light in the Heart

“Sometimes not speaking says more than all the words in the world.”
― Colleen Hoover, Ugly Love

“A fool is made more of a fool, when their mouth is more open than their mind.”
― Anthony Liccione

“Talking is fantastically overrated. Too many people do too much of it. It stuns the hell out of me how so many people like to talk. Sharkey, for example. If talking is so good for you, what the hell is Sharkey doing here? The guy tears me up. Talking does not heal you. Talking just adds to the noise pollution in the world. If we were really serious about going green, then maybe we’d all just be quiet.”
― Benjamin Alire Sáenz, Last Night I Sang to the Monster

“Never complain, never explain. Resist the temptation to defend yourself or make excuses.”
― Brian Tracy