Joseph Campbell Quotes

The call to adventure signifies that destiny has summoned the hero.

Without passion, men are not willing to pay any price or bear any burden to set the captives free.

The best things cannot be told, the second best are misunderstood. After that comes civilized conversation; after that, mass indoctrination; after that, intercultural exchange.

What's made up in the head is the fiction. What comes out of the heart is a myth.

Life is without meaning. You bring the meaning to it.

You are the Hero of your own Story.

It is not society which is to guide and save the creative hero, but precisely the reverse.

You've got to find the force inside you.

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.

Poets and artists who speak of the mystery are rare.

Religon is misunderstood mythology

If you follow someone else's way, you are not going to realize your potential.

To find your own way is to follow your bliss. This involves analysis, watching yourself and seeing where real deep bliss is -- not the quick little excitement , but the real deep, life-filling bliss.

Mythology helps you to identify the mysteries of the energies pouring through you. Therein lies your eternity.

Seek to know the power that is within you.

The experience of Eternity right here and now, is the function of life.

There is no security in following the call to adventure.

The best advise is to take it all as if it had been your intention.

Where is your bliss station? You have to try to find it.

A real artist is the one who has learned to recognize and to render... the 'radiance' of all things as an epiphany or showing forth of the truth.

All life stinks and you must embrace that with compassion.

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

We are standing on a whale fishing for minnows.

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.

One of our problems today is that we are not well acquainted with the literature of the spirit. We re interested in the news of the day and the problems of the hour.

Mythology is often defined as 'other peoples' religions', religion can be thought of as misinterpreted mythology.

I always feel uncomfortable when people speak about ordinary mortals because I've never met an ordinary man, woman or child.

The seat of the soul is where the inner world and the outer world meet.

We need myths that will identify the individual not with his local group but with the planet.

It may be a species of impudence to think that the way you understand God is the way God is. (60).

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)

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.

The departure from the world is regarded not as a fault, but as the first step into that noble path at the remotest turn of which illumination is to be won.

I think it's important to live life with a knowledge of its mystery, and of your own mystery.

There is no greater privilege in life than being yourself.

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

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

In choosing your god, you choose your way of looking at the universe. There are plenty of Gods. Choose yours.

The object becomes aesthetically significant when it becomes metaphysically significant.

The perfect human being is uninteresting.

If there were already a path, it would have to be someone else's; the whole point is to find your own way.

Apocalypse does not point to a fiery Armageddon but to the fact that our ignorance and our complacency are coming to an end.

A woman is a vehicle of life. Life has overtaken her. Woman is what it is all about-the giving of birth and the giving of nourishment.

A myth doesn't have to be real to be true.

The purpose of the journey is compassion. When you have come past the pairs of opposites, you have reached compassion.

Money is congealed energy, and releasing it releases life's possibilities.

If you follow your bliss you will find a path laid out before you that has been waiting for you all along and you will begin to live the life you ought to be living.

The adventure evoked a quality of his character that he didn't know he possessed.

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