Top 100 Quotes About Joseph Campbell
#1. Joseph Campbell said the privilege of a lifetime is being yourself. That's his feeling. And I guess it's mine too.
Viggo Mortensen
#3. I've never read Joseph Campbell, and I don't know all that much about story archetypes.
Christopher Nolan
#4. 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 we actually feel the rapture of being alive. - JOSEPH CAMPBELL
Elizabeth Lesser
#5. Myths and dreams," according to Joseph Campbell, "are manifestations in image form (metaphors) of all of the energies of the body, moved by the organs, in conflict with each other.
James Bonnet
#6. I must admit to being greatly influenced by Joseph Campbell's The Hero With a Thousand Faces.
Norman Spinrad
#7. I didn't learn much about writing at Sarah Lawrence, but I learned a lot about the sources of poems - dreams, myth, history - from the really great teachers, Joseph Campbell, Charles Trinkhaus, Bert Loewenberg, and a young Australian anthropologist named Harry Hawthorne.
Carolyn Kizer
#8. I think with movies I am really connecting to the Joseph Campbell idea of the collective unconscious.
Will Smith
#9. I think if you do what's in your heart - Joseph Campbell always says you have to follow your bliss, and if you do, doors open where you didn't even realize there were doors.
Linda Ronstadt
#10. I have traveled down this path before - 'List of Seven' and 'Twin Peaks' both have thematic similarities - but 'Paladin' took me much deeper into the intuitive underground. Always bearing in mind Joseph Campbell's Rule No. 1: When entering a labyrinth, don't forget your ball of twine.
Mark Frost
#11. If you just read Joseph Campbell, who has written amazing books on mythology and religion, they all do come together at some point. There are some of the greatest stories that there have ever been in the Bible. All you have to do is read the book of Maccabi, it's like a film script.
Mel Gibson
#12. I have a lot of spiritual books that I read that I really, really love - everything from the Bible to Joseph Campbell, who I love. He wrote The Hero of a Thousand Faces. It's about exploring what is heroic in you. It helps me a lot.
Viola Davis
#13. My dad was just a big Joseph Campbell nut.
Trey Parker
#14. Because rage and violence are human emotions and drives and capacities that inhabit us all. SEE CARL JUNG. Or that hipster Joseph Campbell. Because we all take archetypal journeys in a million ways - literal, symbolic, you name it - that figure, disfigure, and refigure violence.
Lidia Yuknavitch
#15. Star Wars is not entertainment. Star Wars is George Lucas masturbating to a picture of Joseph Campbell and conning billions of people into watching the money shot.
John Scalzi
#16. Joseph Campbell, who when asked what spiritual practice he followed said, "I underline books." Me too.
Eric Weiner
#17. My faith, inasmuch as I have any, is more like a kind of Joseph Campbell thing, and even that frequently finds itself tested to oblivion in siren waters.
David Knopfler
#18. 'Star Wars' or 'The Lord of the Rings' deal with great big Joseph Campbell-style myths, good and evil.
Peter Dinklage
#19. I believe in mythology. I guess I share Joseph Campbell's notion that a culture or society without mythology would die, and we're close to that.
Robert Redford
#20. I started studying mythology, just on my own. Joseph Campbell, mysticism.
Antoine Fuqua
#21. The perfect human being is uninteresting. - Joseph Campbell
Laura Greenwald
#23. Every people is a chosen people in its own mind. And it is rather amusing that their name for themselves usually means mankind.
Joseph Campbell
#24. If you are on the right path you will find that invisible hands are helping.
Joseph Campbell
#25. 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.
Joseph Campbell
#26. How do you find the divine power in yourself? The word enthusiasm means 'filled with a god,' so what makes you enthusiastic? Follow it. So I have a little word: follow your bliss. The bliss is the message of God to yourself. That's where your life is.
Joseph Campbell
#27. If you want to change the world, you have to change the metaphor.
Joseph Campbell
#28. Preachers err by trying to talk people into belief; better they reveal the radiance of their own discovery.
Joseph Campbell
#29. With passion you want to possess. The conversion of passion into compassion is the whole problem of marriage.
Joseph Campbell
#30. This, I believe, is the great Western truth: that each of us is a completely unique creature and that, if we are ever to give any gift to the world, it will have to come out of our own experience and fulfillment of our own potentialities, not someone else's.
Joseph Campbell
#31. The fall [of your soul] from perfection into duality ... was naturally followed by the discovery of the duality of good and evil ... This is the Biblical version of a myth known to many lands ...
Joseph Campbell
#32. For the bliss of the deep abode is not lightly abandoned in favor of the self-scattering of the wakened state,
Joseph Campbell
#33. The problem of the hero is to pierce himself (and therewith his world) precisely through that point; to shatter and annihilate that key knot of his limited existence.
Joseph Campbell
#34. The only way you can talk about this great tide in which you're a participant is as Schopenhauer did: the universe is a dream dreamed by a single dreamer where all the dream characters dream too.
Joseph Campbell
#35. The best way to help mankind is through the perfection of yourself.
Joseph Campbell
#37. And so Galahad decided that it would be a disgrace to set off on a quest with the other knights. Alone he would enter the dark forest where there was no path. This is the myth of The Hero's Journey.
Joseph Campbell
#38. 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
#39. Vegetarianism is the first turning away from life, because life lives on lives. Vegetarians are just eating something that can't run away.
Joseph Campbell
#40. The hero of yesterday becomes the tyrant of tomorrow, unless he crucifies himself today.
Joseph Campbell
#41. Facts of the mind made manifest in a fiction of matter,' as my friend the late Maya Deren once phrased the mystery.
Joseph Campbell
#43. The ground of being is the ground of our being, and when we simply turn outward, we see all of these little problems here and there. But, if we look inward, we see that we are the source of them all.
Joseph Campbell
#44. 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
#45. As a white candle / In a holy place, / So is the beauty / Of an aged face
Joseph Campbell
#46. 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
#47. Art brings out the grand lines of nature. Antione Bourdelle
Joseph Campbell
#48. Money is congealed energy, and releasing it releases life's possibilities.
Joseph Campbell
#49. 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
#50. Both the artist and the lover know that perfection is not loveable. It is the clumsiness of a fault that makes a person lovable.
Joseph Campbell
#51. God is an intelligible sphere-a sphere known to mind, not to the senses-whose center is everywhere and whose circumference nowhere.
Joseph Campbell
#52. Mythology is the womb of man's initiation to life and death.
Joseph Campbell
#53. Essentially, mythologies are enormous poems that are renditions of insights, giving some sense of the marvel, the miracle and wonder of life.
Joseph Campbell
#54. The world is full of people who have stopped listening to themselves or have listened only to their neighbors to learn what they ought to do, how they ought to behave, and what the values are they should be living for.
Joseph Campbell
#55. The notion of this universe, its heavens, hells, and everything within it, as a great dream dreamed by a single being in which all the dream characters are dreaming too, has in India enchanted and shaped the entire civilization.
Joseph Campbell
#56. Every myth is psychologically symbolic. Its narratives and images are to be read, therefore, not literally, but as metaphors.
Joseph Campbell
#57. 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
#59. Myth must be kept alive. The people who can keep it alive are the artists of one kind or another.
Joseph Campbell
#60. Life is a guy trying to play a violin solo in public, while learning the music and his instrument at the same time.
Joseph Campbell
#61. When before the beauty of a sunset or a mountain, you pause and exclaim, 'Ah,' you are participating in divinity.
Joseph Campbell
#62. 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
#63. Anyone continually knitting his life into contexts of intention, import, and clarifications of meaning will in the end find that he has lost the sense of experiencing life.
Joseph Campbell
#64. Vegetarians are people who cannot hear tomatos screaming.
Joseph Campbell
#65. When you don't have a job (requiring reading) and you are doing your own reading you've got deep psychological questions. As deep as those of a little boy.
Joseph Campbell
#66. Great Brahma from his mystic heaven groans, And all his priesthood moans.
Joseph Campbell
#67. It is not only that there is no hiding place for the gods from the searching telescope and microscope; there is no such society any more as the gods once supported.
Joseph Campbell
#69. Follow your bliss and the universe will open doors for you where there were only walls.
Joseph Campbell
#70. We are having experiences all the time which may on occasion render some sense of this, a little intuition of where your bliss is. Grab it. No one can tell you what it is going to be. You have to learn to recongnize your own depth.
Joseph Campbell
#71. 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
#72. Heresy is the life of a mythology and orthodoxy is the death.
Joseph Campbell
#73. The call to adventure signifies that destiny has summoned the hero.
Joseph Campbell
#74. There's something inside you that knows when you're in the center, that knows when you're on the beam or off the beam. And if you get off the beam to earn money, you've lost your life. And if you stay in the center and don't get any money, you still have your bliss.
Joseph Campbell
#75. But if you will think of ourselves as coming out of the earth, rather than having been thrown in here from somewhere else, you see that we are the earth, we are the consciousness of the earth. These are the eyes of the earth. And this is the voice of the earth.
Joseph Campbell
#76. There's always the possibility of a fiasco. But there's also the possibility of bliss.
Joseph Campbell
#77. The best advise is to take it all as if it had been your intention.
Joseph Campbell
#78. 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
#80. If you want resurrection, you must have crucifixion ... The hoarder, the one in us that wants to keep, to hold on, must be killed.
Joseph Campbell
#81. Some things die after they born, others born after they die.
myths are public dreams, dreams are privet myths ...
Joseph Campbell
#82. We are kept out of the Garden by our own fear and desire in relation to what we think to be the goods of our life.
Joseph Campbell
#84. Not all who hesitate are lost. The psyche has many secrets in reserve. And these are not disclosed unless required.
Joseph Campbell
#85. When you are on your path, and it is truly your path, doors will open for you where there were no doors for someone else.
Joseph Campbell
#86. 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
#87. 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.
Joseph Campbell
#89. Every moment is utterly unique and will not be continued in eternity. This fact gives life its poignancy and should concentrate your attention on what you are experiencing now.
Joseph Campbell
#90. Man was not breathed into the earth. Man came out of the earth.
Joseph Campbell
#91. At first you might find that nothing happens there. But if you have a sacred space and use it, eventually something will happen. Your sacred space is where you find yourself again and again.
Joseph Campbell
#92. If you can see your path laid out in front of you step by step, you know it's not your path. Your own path you make with every step you take. That's why it's your path.
Joseph Campbell
#93. You don't understand death, you learn to acquiesce in death.
Joseph Campbell
#94. We have to let go of our plans if we are to become the person we are meant to be.
Joseph Campbell
#95. People who don't have a concept of the whole can do very unfortunate things.
Joseph Campbell
#96. Follow your inner heart and the world moves in and helps.
Joseph Campbell
#97. In a wasteland the surface does not represent the actuality of what it is supposed to be representing, and people are living inauthentic lives. "I've never done a thing I wanted to in all my life. I've done as I was told." You know?
Joseph Campbell
#98. There is an Indian fable of three beings who drank from a river: one was a god, and he drank ambrosia; one was a man, and he drank water; and one was a demon, and he drank filth. What you get is a function of your own consciousness.
Joseph Campbell
#99. The first function of mythology is showing everything as a metaphor to transcendence.
Joseph Campbell
#100. The last act in the biography of the hero is that of the death or departure.
Joseph Campbell
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