Joseph Campbell Quotes

If we fix on the old, we get stuck.

The myth does not point to a fact; the myth points beyond facts to something that informs the fact

The dreamer and his dream are the same...the powers personified in a dream are these that move the world.

Have you ever looked inside one of those things [computers]? It's a whole hierarchy of angels- all on slats. And those little tubes-those are miracles.

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

There is no way you can use the word “reality” without quotation marks around it.

Wars and temper tantrums are the makeshifts of ignorance; regrets are illuminations come too late.

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

Marriage . . . is not a love affair; it is an ordeal. (92)

The concept of time shuts off eternity.

If you can see your path clearly in front of you, it's probably someone else's.

You yourself are participating in the evil, or you are not alive. Whatever you do is evil for somebody. This is one of the ironies of the whole creation.

Every religion, every mythology is true in this sense: It is true as metaphorical of the human and cosmic mystery.

There is a God inside my PC. An Old-Testament God with lots of arbitrary rules and utterly no mercy.

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

Man was not breathed into the earth. Man came out of the earth.

We have to permit go with the everyday living we had prepared so as to have the lifetime that's watching for us

The influence of a vital being vitalizes.

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.

The function of artists is "the mythologization of the world."

Everything starts with a story.

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

I don’t think people are really seeking the meaning of Life. I think we’re seeking an experience of being alive…we want to feel the rapture of being alive

It is not only that there is no hiding place for the gods from the searching telescope and microscope; there is no such society any more as the gods once supported.

Myth is what we call other people's religion.

Essentially, mythologies are enormous poems that are renditions of insights, giving some sense of the marvel, the miracle and wonder of life.

A one sentence definition of mythology? Mythology is what we call someone else's religion.

Anything you do has a still point. When you are in that still point, you can perform maximally.

Poetry comes out of an elite experience, the experience of people whose ears are opened to the song of the universe.

Whenever men have looked for something solid on which to found their lives, they have chosen not the facts in which the world abounds, but the myths of an immemorial imagination.

The dance is the highest symbol of life itself.

This is all I ever wanted - to help students and artists see myth as a reflection of the one sublime adventure of life, and then to breathe new life into it.

There is what I would call the hero journey, the night sea journey, the hero quest, where the individual is going to bring forth in his life something that was never beheld before.

Every story you tell is your own story.

The seizure of passionate love can be, in such a context, only illicit, breaking in upon the order of one's dutiful life in virtue as a devastating storm.

One can experience an unconditional affirmation of life only when one has accepted death, not as contrary to life, but as an aspect of it.

I don't have faith, I have experience.

The priests used to say that faith can move mountains, and nobody believed them. Today the scientists say that they can level mountains, and nobody doubts them.

Enlarge the pupil of the eye, so that the body with its attendant personality will no longer obstruct the view. Immortality is then experienced as a present fact.

Truth is one, the sages speak of it by many names.

What gods are there, what gods have there ever been, that were not from man's imagination?

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

He must put aside his pride, his virtue, beauty and life and bow or submit to the absolutely intolerable.

A temple is a landscape of the soul.

A sound precipitates air, then fire, then water and earth- and that's how the world becomes.

And if there was no Fall, what then of the need for Redemption? What god was offended and by whom? Some especially touchy cave bear whose skull had been improperly enshrined?

I don't need faith. I have experience.

All babies are Buddha babies.

There is a condescension on the part of the infinite to the mind of man. That is what looks like God.

When you are falling --- Dive!