Joseph Campbell Quotes

The call to adventure is the point in a person’s life when they are first given notice that everything is going to change, whether they know it or not.

The last act in the biography of the hero is that of the death or departure.

Your own path you make with every step you take. That's why it's your path.

Our life evokes our character and you find out more about yourself as you go on.

You have been thinking one way. Now you have to think a different way.

Whether you call someone a hero or a monster is all relative to where the focus of your consciousness may be.

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.

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

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.

Myths are so intimately bound to culture, time, and place that unless the symbols, the metaphors, are kept alive by constant recreation through the arts, the life just slips away from them.

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

Freud tells us to blame our parents for all the shortcomings of our life, Marx tells us to blame the upper class of our society. But the only one to blame is oneself.

I should have said, 'Follow your blisters.'

Sin always finds it's root in our own selfish desires and self-gratification.

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

Every hero must have the courage to be alone, to take the journey for himself.

The familiar life horizon has been outgrown: the old concepts, ideals, and emotional patterns no longer fit; the time for the passing of a threshold is at hand.

The role of the artist I now understood as that of revealing through the world-surfaces the implicit forms of the soul, and the great agent to assist the artist was the myth.

Privation and suffering alone open the mind to all that is hidden to others. (Igjugarjuk)

Breaking out is following your bliss pattern, quitting the old place, starting your hero journey, following your bliss. You throw off yesterday as the snake sheds its skin.

The entire heavenly realm is within us, but to find it we have to relate to what's outside.

What the artist must render is a living moment somehow, a living moment actually in action or an inward experience.

Behind all these manifestations is the one radiance, which shines through all things.

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

We're all seeking...the rapture of being alive.

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

Any god who can invent hell is no candidate for the Salvation Army

The best we can do is lean towards the light.

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

The latest incarnation of Oedipus, the continued romance of Beauty and the Beast, stand this afternoon on the corner of Forty-second Street and Fifth Avenue, waiting for the traffic light to change.

If you realize what the real problem is-losing yourself-you realize that this itself is the ultimate trial.

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

We have today to learn to get back into accord with the wisdom of nature and realize again our brotherhood with the animals and with the water and the sea.

The perfect human being is uninteresting-the Buddha who leaves the world, you know. It is the imperfections of life that are lovable.

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

When we follow our bliss, we are met by a thousand unseen helping hands.

The mind of man, cleansed of secondary and merely temporal concerns, beholds with the radiance of a cleansed mirror a reflection of the rational mind of God.

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.

If you want to find out what it means to have a society without any rituals, read the New York Times.

Every people is a chosen people in its own mind. And it is rather amusing that their name for themselves usually means mankind.

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.

You can't say life is useless because it ends in the grave.

The adventure that the hero is ready for is the one he gets.

Participate joyfully in the sorrows of life

We know that Jesus could not have ascended to heaven because there is no physical heaven anywhere in the universe. Even ascending at the speed of light, Jesus would still be in the galaxy.

To find your own way is to follow your bliss.

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

For people who are really alive to have life awakened is more important than to get a sandwich.

The courage to face the trials and to bring a whole new body of possibilities into the field of interpreted experience for other people to experience - that is the hero's deed.

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)