Joseph Campbell Quotes

Myth is what we call other people's religion.

Myths are public dreams, dreams are private myths.

Follow your bliss. Find where it is and don't be afraid to follow it.

Follow your bliss and doors will open where there were no doors before.

Your life is the fruit of your own doing. You have no one to blame but yourself.

The hero, the waker of his own soul, is himself but the convenient means of his own dissolution.

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

The images of Myth are reflections of Spiritual and Depth potentialities of every one of us. Through contemplating those we evoke those powers in our own lives to operate through ourselves.

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

I don't have to have faith, I have experience.

Love is a friendship set to music.

You become mature when you become the authority of your own life.

Opportunities to find deeper powers within ourselves come when life seems most challenging.

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.

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.

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.

For the bliss of the deep abode is not lightly abandoned in favor of the self-scattering of the wakened state,

You can get a lot of work done if you stay with it and are excited and its play instead of work.

Passion makes most psychiatrists nervous

The cave you fear to enter holds the treasure you seek.

The demon that you can swallow gives you its power, and the greater life’s pain, the greater life’s reply.

If the path before you is clear, you're probably on someone else's.

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

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

Your sacred space is where you can find yourself over and over again.

The privilege of a lifetime is being who you are.

The psychotic drowns in the same waters in which the mystic swims with delight.

Find a place inside where there's joy, and the joy will burn out the pain.

Heresy is the life of a mythology and orthodoxy is the death.

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

You have to learn to recognize your own depths.

Life will always be sorrowful. We can't change it, but we can change our attitude toward it.

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.

One great thing about growing old is that nothing is going to lead to anything. Everything is of the moment.

Awe is what moves us forward.

Only birth can conquer death—the birth, not of the old thing again, but of something new .

The first function of mythology is showing everything as a metaphor to transcendence.

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.

Our life evokes our character. You find out more about yourself as you go on. That’s why it’s good to be able to put yourself in situations that will evoke your higher nature rather than your lower.

A bit of adviceGiven to a young Native AmericanAt the time of his initiation:As you go the way of life, You will see a great chasm. Jump.It is not as wide as you think.

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.

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

[T]he experience of mystery comes not from expecting it but through yielding all your programs, because your programs are based on fear and desire. Drop them and the radiance comes. (16)

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)

Mythology may, in a real sense, be defined as other people's religion. And religion may, in a sense, be understood as popular misunderstanding of mythology. (8)

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.

When you make the sacrifice in marriage, you're sacrificing not to each other but to unity in a relationship.

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

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.

All of life is a meditation, most of it unintentional.