Joseph Campbell quotes: wise famous quotes, sayings and quotations by Joseph Campbell

Joseph Campbell Famous Quotes & Sayings

Discover top inspirational quotes from Joseph Campbell on Wise Famous Quotes.

Any disaster you can survive is an improvement in your character, your stature, and your life

Follow your bliss and the universe will open doors for you where there were only walls.

Life is a guy trying to play a violin solo in public, while learning the music and his instrument at the same time.

Our actual ultimate root is in our humanity, not in our personal genealogy.

Art is the set of wings to carry you out of your own entanglement.

The hero journey is inside of you; tear off the veils and open the mystery of your self.

People forget facts, but they remember stories.

Mythology is the womb of man's initiation to life and death.

You must give up the life you planned in order to have the life that is waiting for you.

Myth must be kept alive. The people who can keep it alive are the artists of one kind or another.

In the absence of an effective general mythology, each of us has his private, unrecognized, rudimentary, yet secretly potent pantheon of dreams.

If you're going to have a story, have a big story, or none at all.

The quest for fire occurred not because anyone knew what the practical uses for fire would be, but because it was fascinating.

When everything is lost, and all seems darkness, then comes the new life and all that is needed.

If you really want to help this world, what you will have to teach is how to live in it.

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.

If you want to understand what's most important to a society, don't examine its art or literature, simply look at its biggest buildings.

The big question is whether you are going to be able to say a hearty yes to your adventure

Humor is the touchstone of the truly mythological as distinct from the more literal-minded and sentimental theological mood.

Reading what you want, and having one book lead to the next, is the way I found my discipline.

We are standing on a whale fishing for minnows

The very cave you are afraid to enter turns out to be the source of what you are looking for.

For we have not even to risk the adventure alone, for the heros of all time have gone before us ...

If you are to advance, all fixed ideas must go.

You should be willing to be eaten also. You are food body.

When before the beauty of a sunset or a mountain, you pause and exclaim, 'Ah,' you are participating in divinity.

Preachers err by trying to talk people into belief; better they reveal the radiance of their own discovery.

If you travel far enough, you'll eventually meet yourself.

The hero, therefore, is the man or woman who has been able to battle past his personal and local historical limitations.

The schizophrenic is drowning in the same waters in which the mystic swims with delight. Edgar Cayce made the same observation in his readings

The conquest of fear yields the courage of life. That is the cardinal initiation of every heroic adventure
fearlessness and achievement.

Myth is the public dream, and dream is the private myth.

You have to have a feeling for where you are. You've got only one life to live and you don't have to live it for six people. Pay attention to it.

Follow your inner heart and the world moves in and helps.

I think the person who takes a job in order to live - that is to say, for the money [not for purpose or passion]- has turned himself into a slave.

God is a metaphor for that which transcends all levels of intellectual thought. It's as simple as that.

The myth is not my own; I have it from my mother. Euripides

Life has no meaning. Each of us has meaning and we bring it to life. It is a waste to be asking the question when you are the answer.

Making the inner meet the outer is the function of the artist.

I think of compassion as the fundamental religious experience and, unless that is there, you have nothing.

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.

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.

If a being from another world were to ask you, "How can I learn what it's like to be human?" a good answer would be, "Study mythology.

The imitation of Christ is the joyful participation in the sorrows of the world.

A mythological image that has to be explained to the brain is not working.

The person who thinks he has found the ultimate truth is wrong.

The insecure way is the secure way.

I should have said, 'Follow your blisters.'

If you are on the right path you will find that invisible hands are helping.

Myth is the secret opening through which the inexhaustible energies of the cosmos pour into human manifestation ...

The object becomes aesthetically significant when it becomes metaphysically significant.

The god you worship is the one you're capable of becoming.

Vegetarians are people who cannot hear tomatos screaming.

the society that cherishes and keeps its myths alive will be nourished from the soundest, richest strata of the human spirit.

Not all who hesitate are lost. The psyche has many secrets in reserve. And these are not disclosed unless required.

Great is the gate and narrow is the way which leadeth to life, and few there be who find it. And

When people find out what it is that's ticking in them, they get straightened out.

Some things die after they born, others born after they die.
myths are public dreams, dreams are privet myths ...

The realms of the gods and demons - heaven, purgatory, hell - are of the substance of dreams. Myth, in this view, is the dream of the world.

The ultimate, unqualified mystery is beyond Human experience

All the gods, all the heavens, all the worlds, are within us.

In marriage you are not sacrificing yourself to the other person. You are sacrificing yourself to the relationship.

Wherever the poetry of myth is interpreted as biography, history, or science, it is killed.

First you must find your trajectory, and then comes the social coordination.

It is only when a man tames his own demons that he becomes the king of himself if not of the world.

What is a god? A god is a personification of a motivating power of a value system that functions in human life and in the universe.

Hell is life drying up.

Follow your bliss. The heroic life is living the individual adventure.

I don't believe in being interested in a subject just because it's said to be important. I believe in being caught by it somehow or other.

One way or another, we all have to find what best fosters the flowering of our humanity in this contemporary life, and dedicate ourselves to that.

With passion you want to possess. The conversion of passion into compassion is the whole problem of marriage.

Gods suppressed become devils, and often it is these devils whom we first encounter when we turn inward.

The process of nature cannot be evil.

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.

If you are falling....dive.

Both the artist and the lover know that perfection is not loveable. It is the clumsiness of a fault that makes a person lovable.

Midlife is when you reach the top of the ladder and find that it was against the wrong wall.

Computers are like Old Testament gods; lots of rules and no mercy.

When an idea is important to a person or culture it will find its way into imagery.

Once you know the difference between right and wrong, you have lots fewer decisions to make.

Heroism is a matter of integrity
beco ming more and more at each step ourselves.

Deep down inside, we don't seek the meaning of life, but the experience of being alive.

If marriage isn't a first priority in your life, you're not married.

Willed introversion, in fact, is one of the classic implements of creative genius and can be employed as a deliberate device.

Seek to know the power that is within you.

There's always the possibility of a fiasco. But there's also the possibility of bliss.

[M]yths are not invented as stories are. Myths are inspired-they really are. They come from the same realm that dream comes from.

If you want to know what a given society believes in, look at what its largest buildings are devoted to.

If you want to see what a society really believes in, look at what the biggest buildings on the horizon are dedicated to.

As a white candle / In a holy place, / So is the beauty / Of an aged face

Regrets are illuminations come too late.

We save the world by being alive ourselves.

What you have to do, you do with play. The universe is God's play.

I don't believe people are looking for the meaning of life as much as they are looking for the experience of being alive.

One looks, looks long, and the world comes in.

The spirit is the bouquet of nature.

The distance of your love is the distance of your life. Love is exactly as strong as life.

Sentiment is an echo of violence. It's not really a vital expression.

The water in which the mystic swims is the same water a madman drowns in.

Mythological symbols touch and exhilarate centers of life beyond the reach of vocabularies of reason and coercion.