Top 100 Joseph Campbell Quotes
#1. The best way to help mankind is through the perfection of yourself.
Joseph Campbell
#2. Society has provided [children] no rituals by which they become members of the tribe, of the community. All children need to be twice born, to learn to function rationally in the present world, leaving childhood behind.
Joseph Campbell
#3. When you have lived your individual life in your own adventurous way and then look back upon its course, you will find that you have lived a model human life, after all.
Joseph Campbell
#4. At such moments, you realize that you and the other are, in fact, one. It's a big realization. Survival is the second law of life. The first is that we are all one.
Joseph Campbell
#5. One of the many distinctions between the celebrity and the hero, he said, is that one lives for self while the other acts to redeem society.
Joseph Campbell
#6. You yourself are participating in the evil, or you are not alive. Whatever you do is evil for somebody. This is one of the ironies of the whole creation.
Joseph Campbell
#7. When you translate the Bible with excessive literalism, you demythologize it. The possibility of a convincing reference to the individual's own spiritual experience is lost. (111)
Joseph Campbell
#8. Some things die after they born, others born after they die.
myths are public dreams, dreams are privet myths ...
Joseph Campbell
#9. The theme of the Grail is the bringing of life into what is known as 'the wasteland.' The wasteland is the preliminary theme to which the Grail is the answer ... It's the world of people living inauthentic lives - doing what they are supposed to do.
Joseph Campbell
#10. Suddenly you're ripped into being alive. And life is pain, and life is suffering, and life is horror, but my god you're alive and its spectacular.
Joseph Campbell
#11. We must be willing to let go of the life we planned so as to have the life that is waiting for us.
Joseph Campbell
#12. But the makers of legend have seldom rested content to regard the world's great heroes as mere human beings who broke past the horizons that limited their fellows and returned such boons as any man with equal faith and courage might have found.
Joseph Campbell
#13. Our life evokes our character and you find out more about yourself as you go on.
Joseph Campbell
#14. Gods suppressed become devils, and often it is these devils whom we first encounter when we turn inward.
Joseph Campbell
#15. One great thing about growing old is that nothing is going to lead to anything. Everything is of the moment.
Joseph Campbell
#16. It takes courage to do what you want. Other people have a lot of plans for you ... Follow your bliss.
Joseph Campbell
#17. He has yet to confront society with this ego-shattering, life-redeeming elixir, and take the return blow of reasonable queries, hard resentment, and good people at a loss to comprehend.
Joseph Campbell
#18. The function of the artist is the mythologization of the culture and the world. In the visual arts there were two men whose work handled mythological themes in a marvelous way: Paul Klee and Pablo Picasso.
Joseph Campbell
#20. Mythology is to relate found truth to the living of a life.
Joseph Campbell
#21. All the old bindings are broken. Cosmological centers now are anywhere and everywhere. The earth is a heavenly body, most beautiful of all, and all poetry is now archaic that fails to match the wonder of this view.
Joseph Campbell
#22. The quest for fire occurred not because anyone knew what the practical uses for fire would be, but because it was fascinating.
Joseph Campbell
#23. The hero journey is inside of you; tear off the veils and open the mystery of your self.
Joseph Campbell
#24. It's not an advantage to be without a PhD. But it's an advantage not to have taken a PhD because of the things that they do to you to get you into the slot that they want you in.
Joseph Campbell
#25. The latest incarnation of Oedipus, the continued romance of Beauty and the Beast, stand this afternoon on the corner of 42nd Street and Fifth Avenue, waiting for the traffic light to change.
Joseph Campbell
#26. What's made up in the head is the fiction. What comes out of the heart is a myth.
Joseph Campbell
#27. The Deadheads are doing the dance of life and this I would say is the answer to the atom bomb.
Joseph Campbell
#30. The goal of life is to make your heartbeat match the beat of the universe, to match your nature with Nature.
Joseph Campbell
#31. Where we had thought to travel outward, we will come to the center of our own existence. And where we had thought to be alone, we will be with all the world.
Joseph Campbell
#33. The hero, whether god or goddess, man or woman, the figure in a myth or the dreamer of a dream discovers and assimilates his opposite (his own unsuspected self) either by swallowing it or by being swallowed.
Joseph Campbell
#34. The principle of compassion is that which converts disillusionment into a participatory companionship. This is the basic love, the charity, that turns a critic into a living human being who has something to give to - as well as to demand of - the world.
Joseph Campbell
#35. The ultimate aim of the quest must be neither release nor ecstasy for oneself, but the wisdom and the power to serve others.
Joseph Campbell
#36. In our dreams the ageless perils, gargoyles, trials, secret helpers, and instructive figures are nightly still encountered; and in their forms we may see reflected not only the whole picture of our present case, but also the clue to what we must do to be saved.
Joseph Campbell
#38. The dreamer and his dream are the same ... the powers personified in a dream are these that move the world.
Joseph Campbell
#39. Writer's block results from too much head. Cut off your head. Pegasus, poetry, was born of Medusa when her head was cut off. You have to be reckless when writing. Be as crazy as your conscience allows.
Joseph Campbell
#40. It's characteristic of democracy that majority rule is understood as being effective not only in politics but also in thinking. In thinking, of course, the majority is always wrong.
Joseph Campbell
#43. I had to climb a mountain. There were all kinds of obstacles in the way. I had now to jump over a ditch, now to get over a hedge, and finally to stand still because I had lost my breath.
This was the dream of a stutterer.
Joseph Campbell
#44. In our society of fixed texts and printed words, it is the function of the poet to see the life value of the facts round about, and to deify them, as it were, to provide images that relate the everyday to the eternal.
Joseph Campbell
#45. The All is everywhere, and anywhere may become the seat of power. Any blade of grass may assume, in myth, the figure of the savior and conduct the questing wanderer into the sanctum sanctorum of his own heart.
Joseph Campbell
#47. The ultimate dragon is within you, it is your ego clamping you down.
Joseph Campbell
#48. If you want to see what a society really believes in, look at what the biggest buildings on the horizon are dedicated to.
Joseph Campbell
#49. And if there was no Fall, what then of the need for Redemption? What god was offended and by whom? Some especially touchy cave bear whose skull had been improperly enshrined?
Joseph Campbell
#50. Eternity is not the hereafter ... this is it. If you don't get it here you won't get it anywhere.
Joseph Campbell
#51. It's important to live life with the experience, and therefore the knowledge, of its mystery and of your own mystery. This gives life a new radiance, a new harmony, a new splendor.
Joseph Campbell
#52. There is no make-believe about heaven, future bliss, and compensation, to alleviate the bitter majesty, but only utter darkness, the void of unfulfillment, to receive and eat back the lives that have been tossed forth from the womb only to fail.
Joseph Campbell
#53. A myth is something that has never happened, but is happening all the time.
Joseph Campbell
#54. If you live with the myths in your mind, you will find yourself always in mythological situations. They cover everything that can happen to you. And that enables you to interpret the myth in relation to life, as well as life in relation to myth.
Joseph Campbell
#55. One can experience an unconditional affirmation of life only when one has accepted death, not as contrary to life, but as an aspect of it.
Joseph Campbell
#56. If you realize what the real problem is-losing yourself-you realize that this itself is the ultimate trial.
Joseph Campbell
#59. 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
#60. In the absence of an effective general mythology, each of us has his private, unrecognized, rudimentary, yet secretly potent pantheon of dreams.
Joseph Campbell
#61. The senses are a kind of reason. Taste, touch and smell, hearing and seeing, are not merely a means to sensation, enjoyable or otherwise, but they are also a means to knowledge - and are, indeed, your only actual means to knowledge.
Joseph Campbell
#62. Whenever men have looked for something solid on which to found their lives, they have chosen not the facts in which the world abounds, but the myths of an immemorial imagination.
Joseph Campbell
#64. When we follow our bliss, we are met by a thousand unseen helping hands.
Joseph Campbell
#65. The eternal principle, which never was born, never will die: it is in all things: it is in you now. You are the wave on the face of the ocean. When the wave is gone, is the water gone? Has anything happened? Nothing has happened. It is a play, a game, a dance.
Joseph Campbell
#66. Anything you do has a still point. When you are in that still point, you can perform maximally.
Joseph Campbell
#67. You have been thinking one way. Now you have to think a different way.
Joseph Campbell
#68. I don't think people are really seeking the meaning of Life. I think we're seeking an experience of being alive ... we want to feel the rapture of being alive
Joseph Campbell
#69. All that we see is but the reflex of a power that endures, untouched by the pain ... a transcendent anonymity regarding itself in all of the self-centered, battling egos that are born and die in time.
Joseph Campbell
#70. Freud tells us to blame our parents for all the shortcomings of our life, Marx tells us to blame the upper class of our society. But the only one to blame is oneself.
Joseph Campbell
#71. The less there is of you, the more you experience the sublime.
Joseph Campbell
#72. We are the consciousness of the earth. We are the eyes of the earth. The voice of the earth.
Joseph Campbell
#73. Moyers: {TS] Eliot speaks about the still point of the turning world, where motion and stasis are together, the hub where the movement of time and the stillness of eternity are together.
Joseph Campbell
#74. The goal of life is rapture. Art is the way we experience it.
Joseph Campbell
#77. The myth is not my own; I have it from my mother. Euripides
Joseph Campbell
#78. You can get a lot of work done if you stay with it and are excited and its play instead of work.
Joseph Campbell
#79. Deep down inside, we don't seek the meaning of life, but the experience of being alive.
Joseph Campbell
#80. Willed introversion, in fact, is one of the classic implements of creative genius and can be employed as a deliberate device.
Joseph Campbell
#81. The creative act is not hanging on, but yielding to a new creative movement. Awe is what moves us forward.
Joseph Campbell
#82. The image of God is your final obstruction to a religious experience.
Joseph Campbell
#83. The Garden is a metaphor for the following: our minds, and our thinking in terms of pairs of opposites
man and woman, good and evil
are as holy as that of a god. (50)
Joseph Campbell
#84. If myth is translated into literal fact, then myth is a lie. But if you read it as a reflection of the world inside you, then it's true. Myth is the penultimate truth.
Joseph Campbell
#85. They thought that it would be a disgrace to go forth as a group. Each entered the forest at a point that he himself had chosen, where it was darkest and there was no path. If there is a path it is someone else's path and you are not on the adventure.
Joseph Campbell
#86. Eternity is not future or past. Eternity is a dimension of now. It is a dimension of the human spirit
which is eternal. Find that eternal dimension in yourself, and you will ride through time, and throughout the whole length of your days.
Joseph Campbell
#87. The world is perfect. It's a mess. It has always been a mess. We are not going to change it.
Joseph Campbell
#88. There have been systems of religion where the mother is the prime parent, the source, and she's really a more immediate parent than the father, because one is born from the mother ... so that the image of the woman is the image of the world.
Joseph Campbell
#89. Our true reality is in our identity and unity with all life.
Joseph Campbell
#90. A hero is not a champion of things become, but of things becoming; the dragon to be slain by him is precisely the monster of the status quo.
Joseph Campbell
#91. In meditating, meditate on your own divinity. The goal of life is to be a vehicle for something higher. Keep your eyes up there between the world of opposites watching your 'play' in the world.Let the world be as it is and learn to rock with the waves.
Joseph Campbell
#92. You should be willing to be eaten also. You are food body.
Joseph Campbell
#93. He who thinks he knows, doesn't know. He who knows that he doesn't know, knows.
Joseph Campbell
#94. A one sentence definition of mythology? Mythology is what we call someone else's religion.
Joseph Campbell
#95. The cave you fear to enter holds the treasure you seek.
Joseph Campbell
#96. For people who are really alive to have life awakened is more important than to get a sandwich.
Joseph Campbell
#97. There is a condescension on the part of the infinite to the mind of man. That is what looks like God.
Joseph Campbell
#98. When you follow your bliss a kind of track opens up, that's always been there, waiting for you. And the life that you should be living, is the one that you will be living.
Joseph Campbell
#99. Myths are so intimately bound to culture, time, and place that unless the symbols, the metaphors, are kept alive by constant recreation through the arts, the life just slips away from them.
Joseph Campbell
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