Top 500 Joseph Campbell Quotes (2025 Update)
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51. “We’re so engaged in doing things to achieve purposes of outer value that we forget the inner value, the rapture that is associated with being alive, is what it is all about.”

— Joseph Campbell

52. “When we talk about settling the world’s problems, we’re barking up the wrong tree. The world is perfect. It’s a mess. It has always been a mess. We’re not going to change it. Our job is to straighten out our own lives.”

— Joseph Campbell

53. “The very cave you are afraid to enter turns out to be the source of what you are looking for.”

— Joseph Campbell

54. “A dream is your creative vision for your life in the future. A goal is what specifically you intend to make happen. Dreams and goals should be just out of your present reach but not out of sight. Dreams and goals are coming attractions in your life.”

— Joseph Campbell

55. “All religions are true but none are literal.”

— Joseph Campbell

56. “Whatever the hell happens, say, ‘This is what I need.’”

— Joseph Campbell

57. “The place to find is within yourself.”

— Joseph Campbell

58. “It is within you that the divine lives.”

— Joseph Campbell

59. “Respect your curses, for they are the instruments of your destiny.”

— Joseph Campbell

60. “The schizophrenic is drowning in the same waters in which the mystic swims with delight. Edgar Cayce made the same observation in his readings.”

— Joseph Campbell

61. “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.”

— Joseph Campbell

62. “You can’t have creativity unless you leave behind the bounded, the fixed, all the rules.”

— Joseph Campbell

63. “Follow your bliss. The heroic life is living the individual adventure. There is no security in following the call to adventure. Nothing is exciting if you know what the outcome is going to be.”

— Joseph Campbell

64. “Myths are public dreams, dreams are private myths.”

— Joseph Campbell

65. “Nothing can happen to you that is not positive. Even though it looks and feels at the moment like a negative crisis, it is not. The crisis throws you back, and when you are required to exhibit strength, it comes.”

— Joseph Campbell

66. “The key to the Grail is compassion, ‘suffering with,’ feeling another’s sorrow as if it were your own. The one who finds the dynamo of compassion is the one who’s found the Grail.”

— Joseph Campbell

67. “Sit in a room and read – and read and read. And read the right books by the right people. Your mind is brought onto that level, and you have a nice, mild, slow-burning rapture all the time.”

— Joseph Campbell

68. “The conquest of fear yields the courage of life. That is the cardinal initiation of every heroic adventure – fearlessness and achievement.”

— Joseph Campbell

69. “Everything starts with a story.”

— Joseph Campbell

70. “We save the world by being alive ourselves.”

— Joseph Campbell

71. “A bit of advice Given to a young Native American At 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.”

— Joseph Campbell

72. “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.”

— Joseph Campbell

73. “The ultimate aim of the quest must be neither release nor ecstasy for oneself, but the wisdom and the power to serve others.”

— Joseph Campbell

74. “In marriage you are not sacrificing yourself to the other person. You are sacrificing yourself to the relationship.”

— Joseph Campbell

75. “The god you worship is the one you’re capable of becoming.”

— Joseph Campbell

76. “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.”

— Joseph Campbell

77. “Participate joyfully in the sorrows of life.”

— Joseph Campbell

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

— Joseph Campbell

79. “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.”

— Joseph Campbell

80. “The function of artists is “the mythologization of the world.””

— Joseph Campbell

81. “The black moment is the moment when the real message of transformation is going to come. At the darkest moment comes the light.”

— Joseph Campbell

82. “How to get rid of ego as dictator and turn it into messenger and servant and scout, to be in your service, is the trick.”

— Joseph Campbell

83. “There is no security in following the call to adventure.”

— Joseph Campbell

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

— Joseph Campbell

85. “Life is a guy trying to play a violin solo in public, while learning the music and his instrument at the same time.”

— Joseph Campbell

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

— Joseph Campbell

87. “Don’t do anything that isn’t play.”

— Joseph Campbell

88. “Participate joyfully in the sorrows of the world. We cannot cure the world of sorrows, but we can choose to live in joy.”

— Joseph Campbell

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

— Joseph Campbell

90. “A temple is a landscape of the soul.”

— Joseph Campbell

91. “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.”

— Joseph Campbell

92. “The goal is to live with God like composure on the full rush of energy, like Dionysus riding the leopard, without being torn to pieces.”

— Joseph Campbell

93. “When everything is lost, and all seems darkness, then comes the new life and all that is needed.”

— Joseph Campbell

94. “Computers are like Old Testament gods; lots of rules and no mercy.”

— Joseph Campbell

95. “And that Aha! that you get when you see an artwork that really hits you is, ‘I am that.’ I am the very radiance of energy that is talking to me through this painting.”

— Joseph Campbell

96. “Is the system going to flatten you out and deny you your humanity, or are you going to be able to make use of the system to the attainment of human purposes?”

— Joseph Campbell

97. “The Navajo have that wonderful image of what they call the pollen path. The Navajo say, ‘Oh, beauty before me, beauty behind me, beauty to the right of me, beauty to the left of me, beauty above me, beauty below me, I’m on the pollen path.’”

— Joseph Campbell

98. “Life is but a mask worn on the face of death. And is death, then, but another mask? ‘How many can say,’ asks the Aztec poet, ‘that there is, or is not, a truth beyond?’”

— Joseph Campbell

99. “You enter the forest at the darkest point, where there is no path. Where there is a way or path, it is someone else’s path. You are not on your own path. If you follow someone else’s way, you are not going to realize your potential.”

— Joseph Campbell

100. “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.”

— Joseph Campbell