Joseph Campbell Quotes

Do what gives you bliss.

An old Apache storyteller reminds us

The function of (heroic) symbols is to give you a sense of Aha! Yes, I know what it is, it's myself.

The myth is the public dream and the dream is the private myth.

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 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.

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.

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

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

The fundamental human experience is that of compassion.

Mythology is to relate found truth to the living of a life.

The imitation of Christ is the joyful participation in the sorrows of the world.

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.

Follow your bliss and the universe will open doors for you where there were only walls.

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

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

We must be willing to let go of the life we planned so as to have the life that is waiting for us.

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

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

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

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

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.

A hero ventures forth from the worldof common day into a region ofsupernatural wonder. Fabulous forcesare there encountered and a decisivevictory is won.

It is only when a man tames his own demons that he becomes the king of himself if not of the world.

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.

A myth is something that has never happened, but is happening all the time.

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.

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.

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

You must give up the life you planned in order to have the life that is waiting for you.

It has always been the prime function of mythology and rite to supply the symbols that carry the human spirit forward, in counteraction to those that tend to tie it back.

You have to learn to recognize your own depths.

With passion you want to possess. The conversion of passion into compassion is the whole problem of marriage.

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

I think the person who takes a job in order to live - that is to say, for the money [not for purpose or passion]- has turned himself into a slave.

Poets are simply those who have made a profession ans a lifestyle of being in touch with their bliss.

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

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

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

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

Follow your bliss and don't be afraid, and doors will open where you didn't know they were going to be.

If you do follow your bliss you put yourself on a kind of track that has been there all the while, waiting for you, and the life that you ought to be living is the one you are living.

Love is a friendship set to music.

Computers are like Old Testament gods lots of rules and no mercy.