Top 500 Joseph Campbell Quotes (2024 Update)
Page 3 of 10

101. “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

102. “Sin always finds it’s root in our own selfish desires and self-gratification.”

— Joseph Campbell

103. “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

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

— Joseph Campbell

105. “Love is perfect kindness.”

— Joseph Campbell

106. “We’re not on our journey to save the world but to save ourselves. But in doing that you save the world. The influence of a vital person vitalizes.”

— Joseph Campbell

107. “You know the rule: If you are falling, dive. Do the thing that has to be done.”

— Joseph Campbell

108. “If you live with the myths in your mind, you will find yourself always in mythological situations. They cover everything that can happen to you. And that enables you to interpret the myth in relation to life, as well as life in relation to myth.”

— Joseph Campbell

109. “Instead of clearing his own heart the zealot tries to clear the world.”

— Joseph Campbell

110. “We keep thinking of deity as a kind of fact, somewhere; God as a fact. God is simply our own notion of something that is symbolic of transcendence and mystery. The mystery is what’s important.”

— Joseph Campbell

111. “The best things cannot be told because they transcend thought. The second best are misunderstood because they are the thoughts that are supposed to refer to that which cannot be thought about. The third best are what we talk about.”

— Joseph Campbell

112. “If you want to change the world, you have to change the metaphor.”

— Joseph Campbell

113. “When we quit thinking primarily about ourselves and our own self-preservation, we undergo a truly heroic transformation of consciousness.”

— Joseph Campbell

114. “The function of the society is to cultivate the individual. It is not the function of the individual to support society.”

— Joseph Campbell

115. “What you have to do, you do with play. The universe is God’s play.”

— Joseph Campbell

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

— Joseph Campbell

117. “Marriage is not a simple love affair, it’s an ordeal, and the ordeal is the sacrifice of ego to a relationship in which two have become one.”

— Joseph Campbell

118. “What will they think of me? Must be put aside for bliss.”

— Joseph Campbell

119. “Follow your bliss and don’t be afraid, and door will open where you didn’t know they were going to be.”

— Joseph Campbell

120. “Where you stumble and fall, there you will find gold.”

— Joseph Campbell

121. “The seat of the soul is where the inner world and the outer world meet.”

— Joseph Campbell

122. “The best we can do is lean towards the light.”

— Joseph Campbell

123. “Wisdom and foolishness are practically the same. Both are indifferent to the opinions of the world.”

— Joseph Campbell

124. “I should have said, ‘Follow your blisters.’”

— Joseph Campbell

125. “I think of mythology as the homeland of the muses, the inspirers of art, the inspirers of poetry. To see life as a poem and yourself participating in a poem is what the myth does for you.”

— Joseph Campbell

126. “Myth is much more important and true than history. History is just journalism and you know how reliable that is.”

— Joseph Campbell

127. “If you’re going to have a story, have a big story, or none at all.”

— Joseph Campbell

128. “You must have a room, or a certain hour or so a day, where you don’t know what was in the newspapers that morning a place where you can simply experience and bring forth what you are and what you might be.”

— Joseph Campbell

129. “To find your own way is to follow your bliss. This involves analysis, watching yourself and seeing where real deep bliss is – not the quick little excitement, but the real deep, life-filling bliss.”

— Joseph Campbell

130. “Apocalypse does not point to a fiery Armageddon, but to our ignorance and complacency coming to an end.”

— Joseph Campbell

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

— Joseph Campbell

132. “Awe is what moves us forward.”

— Joseph Campbell

133. “The insecure way is the secure way.”

— Joseph Campbell

134. “The Deadheads are doing the dance of life and this I would say is the answer to the atom bomb.”

— Joseph Campbell

135. “The demon that you can swallow gives you it’s power, and the greater life’s pain, the greater life’s reply.”

— Joseph Campbell

136. “Mythology helps you to identify the mysteries of the energies pouring through you. Therein lies your eternity.”

— Joseph Campbell

137. “The purpose of the journey is compassion. When you have come past the pairs of opposites, you have reached compassion.”

— Joseph Campbell

138. “Seek to know the power that is within you.”

— Joseph Campbell

139. “It’s only when a man tames his own demons that he becomes the king of himself if not of the world.”

— Joseph Campbell

140. “Follow your inner heart and the world moves in and helps.”

— Joseph Campbell

141. “What I think is that a good life is one hero journey after another. Over and over again, you are called to the realm of adventure, you are called to new horizons. Each time, there is the same problem: do I dare? And then if you do dare, the dangers are there, and the help also, in the fulfillment or the fiasco.”

— Joseph Campbell

142. “Survival is the second law of life. The first is that we are all one.”

— Joseph Campbell

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

— Joseph Campbell

144. “The adventure is always and everywhere a passage beyond the veil of the known into the unknown; the powers that watch at the boundary are dangerous; to deal with them is risky; yet for anyone with competence and courage the danger fades.”

— Joseph Campbell

145. “You must have a place to which you can go in your heart, your mind, or your house, almost every day, where you do not owe anyone and where no one owes you – a place that simply allows for the blossoming of something new and promising.”

— Joseph Campbell

146. “The problem in middle life, when the body has reached its climax of power and begins to decline, is to identify yourself not with the body, which is falling away, but with the consciousness of which it is a vehicle. This is something I learned from myths.”

— Joseph Campbell

147. “God is an intelligible sphere-a sphere known to mind, not to the senses-whose center is everywhere and whose circumference nowhere.”

— Joseph Campbell

148. “Love is the burning point of life, and since all life is sorrowful, so is love. The stronger the love, the more the pain. Love itself is pain, you might say -the pain of being truly alive.”

— Joseph Campbell

149. “Our life evokes our character. You find out more about yourself as you go on. That’s why it’s good to put yourself in situations that will evoke your higher nature rather than your lower.”

— Joseph Campbell

150. “The idea of the Bodhisattva is the one who out of his realization of transcendence participates in the world. The imitation of Christ is joyful participation in the sorrows of the world.”

— Joseph Campbell