Top 500 Joseph Campbell Quotes (2023 Update)
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451. “Everything, all the time, is causing everything else.”

— Joseph Campbell

452. “Significant images render insights beyond speech, beyond the kinds of meaning speech defines. And if they do not speak to you, that is because you are not ready for them, and words will only serve to make you think you have understood, thus cutting you off altogether.”

— Joseph Campbell

453. “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.”

— Joseph Campbell

454. “The journey of the hero is about the courage to seek the depths; the image of creative rebirth; the eternal cycle of change within us; the uncanny discovery that the seeker is the mystery which the seeker seeks to know. The hero journey is a symbol that binds, in the original sense of the word, two distant ideas, the spiritual quest of the ancients with the modern search for identity, “always the one, shape-shifting yet marvelously constant story that we find.”

— Joseph Campbell

455. “I will never forget the experience I had when I was in Japan, a place that never heard of the Fall and the Garden of Eden. One of the Shinto texts says that the processes of nature cannot be evil. Every natural impulse is not to be corrected but to be sublimated, to be beautified. There is a glorious interest in the beauty of nature and cooperation with nature, so that in some of those gardens you don’t know where nature begins and art ends – this was a tremendous experience.”

— Joseph Campbell

456. “Yes. What you have here is what might be translated into raw individualism, you see, if you didn’t realize that the center was also right there facing you in the other person. This is the mythological way of being an individual. You are the central mountain, and the central mountain is everywhere.”

— Joseph Campbell

457. “We no longer desire and fear; we are what was desired and feared.”

— Joseph Campbell

458. “The happy ending of the fairy tale, the myth, and the divine comedy of the soul, is to be read, not as a contradiction, but as a transcendence of the universal tragedy of man.”

— Joseph Campbell

459. “Tragedy is the shattering of the forms and of our attachment to the forms; comedy, the wild and careless, inexhaustible joy of life invincible.”

— Joseph Campbell

460. “You don’t understand death, you learn to acquiesce in death.”

— Joseph Campbell

461. “The problem of the theologian is to keep his symbol translucent, so that it may not block out the very light it is supposed to convey.”

— Joseph Campbell

462. “The contemplation of the life thus should be undertaken as a meditation on one’s own immanent divinity, not as a prelude to precise imitation, the lesson being, not “Do thus and be good,” but “Know this and be God.”

— Joseph Campbell

463. “As the individual is an organ of society, so is the tribe or city – so is humanity entire – only a phase of the mighty organism of the cosmos.”

— Joseph Campbell

464. “People have the notion of saving the world by shifting things around, changing the rules, and who’s on top, and so forth. No, no! Any world is a valid world if it’s alive. The thing to do is to bring life to it, and the only way to do that is to find in your own case where the life is and become alive yourself.”

— Joseph Campbell

465. “The ultimate experience of love is a realization that beneath the illusion of two-ness dwells identity.”

— Joseph Campbell

466. “This is one of the glorious things about the mother-goddess religions, where the world is the body of the Goddess, divine in itself, and divinity isn’t something ruling over and above a fallen nature.”

— Joseph Campbell

467. “And then they eat the apple, the knowledge of the opposites.”

— Joseph Campbell

468. “Apparently the most permanent of the dispositions of the human psyche are those that derive from the fact that, of all animals, we remain the longest at the mother breast.”

— Joseph Campbell

469. “Woman, in the picture language of mythology, represents the totality of what can be known. The hero is the one who comes to know.”

— Joseph Campbell

470. “Joseph Campbell affirmed life as adventure. “To hell with it,” he said, after his university adviser tried to hold him to a narrow academic curriculum. He gave up on the pursuit of a doctorate and went instead into the woods to read. He continued all his life to read books about the world: anthropology, biology, philosophy, art, history, religion. And he continued to remind others that one sure path into the world runs along the printed page.”

— Joseph Campbell

471. “Human beings are born too soon; they are unfinished, unready as yet to meet the world. Consequently their whole defense from a universe of dangers is the mother, under whose protection the intra-uterine period is prolonged.”

— Joseph Campbell

472. “Giving birth is definitely a heroic deed, in that it is the giving over of oneself to the life of another.”

— Joseph Campbell

473. “Nevertheless, every failure to cope with a life situation must be laid, in the end, to a restriction of consciousness. Wars and temper tantrums are the makeshifts of ignorance; regrets are illuminations come too late.”

— Joseph Campbell

474. “Though omnipotence may seem to be endangered by the threshold passages and life awakenings, protective power is always and ever present within the sanctuary of the heart and even immanent within, or just behind, the unfamiliar features of the world. One has only to know and trust, and the ageless guardians will appear. Having responded to his own call, and continuing to follow courageously as the consequences unfold, the hero finds all the forces of the unconscious at his side.”

— Joseph Campbell

475. “In the Old Testament story God points out the one forbidden thing. Now, God must have known very well that man was going to eat the forbidden fruit. But it was by doing that that man became the initiator of his own life. Life really began with that act of disobedience.”

— Joseph Campbell

476. “The adventure of the hero represents the moment in his life when he achieved illumination – the nuclear moment when, while still alive, he found and opened the road to the light beyond the dark walls of our living death.”

— Joseph Campbell

477. “So perhaps the hero lurks in each one of us when we don’t know it? CAMPBELL: 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. “Lead us not into temptation.”

— Joseph Campbell

478. “The realm of the gods is a forgotten dimension of the world we know. And the exploration of that dimension, either willingly or unwillingly, is the whole sense of the deed of the hero. The values and distinctions that in normal life seem important disappear with the terrifying assimilation of the self into what formerly was only otherness.”

— Joseph Campbell

479. “Mythology is the song. It is the song of the imagination, inspired by the energies of the body.”

— Joseph Campbell

480. “From the perspective of the source, the world is a majestic harmony of forms pouring into being, exploding, and dissolving. But what the swiftly passing creatures experience is a terrible cacophony of battle cries and pain.”

— Joseph Campbell

481. “The hero is the man of self-achieved submission. But submission to what? That precisely is the riddle that today we have to ask ourselves and that it is everywhere the primary virtue and historic deed of the hero to have solved.”

— Joseph Campbell

482. “The figure of the tyrant-monster is known to the mythologies, folk traditions, legends, and even nightmares, of the world; and his characteristics are essentially everywhere the same. He is the hoarder of the general benefit.”

— Joseph Campbell

483. “We are all reflexes of the image of the Bodhisattva. The sufferer within us is that divine being.”

— Joseph Campbell

484. “The crux of the curious difficulty lies in the fact that our conscious views of what life ought to be seldom correspond to what life really is.”

— Joseph Campbell

485. “Wherever the poetry of myth is interpreted as biography, history or science, it is killed. The living images become only remote facts of a distant time or sky.”

— Joseph Campbell

486. “Wherever a hero has been born, has wrought, or has passed back into the void, the place is marked and sanctified. A temple is erected there to signify and inspire the miracle of perfect centeredness; for this is the place of the breakthrough into abundance. Someone at this point discovered eternity.”

— Joseph Campbell

487. “Dream is the personalized myth, myth is the depoersonalized dream; both myth and dream are symbolic in the same general way of the dynamics of the psyche.”

— Joseph Campbell

488. “I was intrigued by the definition of the Force. Ben Kenobi says, “The Force is an energy field created by all living things. It surrounds us, it penetrates us, it binds the galaxy together.” And I’ve read in The Hero with a Thousand Faces similar descriptions of the world navel, of the sacred place, of the power that is at the moment of creation.”

— Joseph Campbell

489. “You changed the definition of a myth from the search for meaning to the experience of meaning. CAMPBELL: Experience of life.”

— Joseph Campbell

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

— Joseph Campbell

491. “All of life is a meditation, most of it unintentional.”

— Joseph Campbell

492. “Myth helps you to put your mind in touch with this experience of being alive.”

— Joseph Campbell

493. “Metaphysics yields to prehistory, which is dim and vague at first, but becomes gradually precise in detail. The heroes become less and less fabulous, until at last, in the final stages of the various local traditions, legend opens into the common daylight of recorded time.”

— Joseph Campbell

494. “But if we are to grasp the full value of the materials, we must note that myths are not exactly comparable to dream. Their figures originate from the same sources – the unconscious wells of fantasy – and their grammar is the same, but they are not the spontaneous products of sleep. On the contrary their patterns are consciously controlled. And their understood function is to serve as powerful picture language for the communication of traditional wisdom.”

— Joseph Campbell

495. “The lines of communication between the conscious and the unconscious zones of the human psyche have all been cut, and we have been split in two.”

— Joseph Campbell

496. “It is by means of our own victories, if we are not regenerated, that the work of Nemesis is wrought: doom breaks from the shell of our very virtue.”

— Joseph Campbell

497. “And more important, all the life-potentialities that we never managed to bring to adult realization, those other portions of ourself, are there; for such golden seeds do not die. If only a portion of that lost totality could be dredged up into the light of day, we should experience a marvelous expansion of our powers, a vivid renewal of life.”

— Joseph Campbell

498. “If a being from another world were to ask you, “How can I learn what it’s like to be human?” a good answer would be, “Study mythology.”

— Joseph Campbell

499. “From the standpoint of the Olympians, eon after eon of earthly history rolls by, revealing ever the harmonious form of the total round, so that where men see only change and death, the blessed behold immutable form, world without end. But now the problem is to maintain this cosmic standpoint in the face of an immediate earthly pain or joy.”

— Joseph Campbell

500. “The unpardonable sin, in Campbell’s book, was the sin of inadvertence, of not being alert, not quite awake.”

— Joseph Campbell