Joseph Campbell Quotes

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

We're not on our journey to save the world but to save ourselves. But in doing that you save the world. The influence of a vital person vitalizes.

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.

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

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

Let the world be as it is and learn to rock with the waves.

What am I? Am I the bulb that carries the light, or am I the light of which the bulb is a vehicle?

We save the world by being alive ourselves.

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

Wisdom and foolishness are practically the same. Both are indifferent to the opinions of the world

The function of ritual, as I understand it, is to give form to human life, not in the way of a mere surface arrangement, but in depth.

When you follow your bliss...doors will open where you would not have thought there would be doors, and where there wouldn't be a door for anyone else.

What will they think of me? Must be put aside for bliss

Love is the burning point of life, and since all life is sorrowful, so is love. The stronger the love, the more the pain. Love itself is pain, you might say -the pain of being truly alive.

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

Respect your curses, for they are the instruments of your destiny.

Now, when Luke Skywalker unmasks his father, he is taking off the machine role that the father has played. The father was the uniform. That is power, the state role.

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)

The job of an educator is to teach students to see vitality in themselves

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

I always tell my students, go where your body and soul want to go. When you have the feeling, then stay with it, and don't let anyone throw you off.

The sin of inadvertence, not being alert, not quite awake, is the sin of missing the moment of life-live with unremitting alertness.

Love is perfect kindness.

What we are really living for is the experience of life, both the pain and the pleasure.

A bit of advice Given to a young Native American At 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.

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.

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.

Mythologies, in other words, mythologies and religions are great poems and, when recognized as such, point infallibly through things and events to the ubiquity of a

Vegetarians are people who cannot hear tomatos screaming.

You can't have creativity unless you leave behind the bounded, the fixed, all the rules

And that Aha! that you get when you see an artwork that really hits you is, 'I am that.' I am the very radiance of energy that is talking to me through this painting.

The idea of the Bodhisattva is the one who out of his realization of transcendence participates in the world. The imitation of Christ is joyful participation in the sorrows of the world.

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

I think what we lack isn't science, but poetry that reveals what the heart is ready to recognize

Art is the clothing of a revelation

He who thinks he knows, doesn't know. He who knows that he doesn't know, knows.

The fates lead him who will; him who won't they drag.

The insecure way is the secure way.

So that's what destiny is: simply the fulfillment of the potentialites of the energies in your own system.

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

If you want to change the world, you have to change the metaphor.

God is an intelligible sphere-a sphere known to mind, not to the senses-whose center is everywhere and whose circumference nowhere.

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

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

We are the consciousness of the earth. We are the eyes of the earth. The voice of the earth.

You have to learn to recognize your own depth.

Instead of clearing his own heart the zealot tries to clear the world.

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

[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)

How to get rid of ego as dictator and turn it into messenger and servant and scout, to be in your service, is the trick.